DIY Hack: How to Easily Make Glow-in-the-Dark Halloween Costumes

Tools and materials:

• Glow in the dark paint
• Pink shirt
• Black cotton dress
• Black cotton pants
• Black cotton hoodie
• Brush
• Chalk 
• Black felt or foam
• Alligator clips
• Ruler
• Paperclips
• Glue

Glow-in-the-dark Vampirina costume

1. Draw the lines of the dress

Start by finding the center point in the dress so that the line running down the middle is in the right spot. Mark the bottom and the top, take a ruler, and draw a straight line. Now for the next two, they're almost like princess seam lines. 

I don't have a curved ruler, so I just marked the top and the bottom and then drew little feather strokes to create a soft, subtle curve.

Tip: use chalk to draw the lines so that if you make a mistake, you can just brush it away.

2. Paint the spiderwebs

On Vampirina's dress, the spider webs angle up. With a pen, draw some curves, leaving a gap of about an inch and a half between each one. Then join them up to look like those spider webs are going from line to line to line to line. Go over the lines with your glow-in-the-dark paint. 

3. Paint the necklace

On Vampirina’s shirt, she has a little skeleton necklace. Instead of making a necklace, I just decided to paint the collar of the shirt black to give the same effect. Start with a flat brush and go all along the edge of the neckline. 

Then put a paper towel into the neck hole so you can paint the very top of the neckline without getting any on the back side of the top. For the skeleton head, I am artistic, so I hand drew this, but you could also find a template online.

4. Make the ears

Draw a template of vampire ears. Then, with your foam or felt folded in half, copy your template on top, and then cut it out. Flip the template over and do the same thing again to have two mirror-image right and left ears. 

Next, attach an alligator clip in the middle of each ear. Add a little bit of fabric glue and put some paper clips on the ears to hold them in place while they dry. 

Glow-in-the-dark stick figure costumes

1. Draw the v-off

I'm using a sweatshirt and a pair of pants, so I need to decide where the v-off (that divides the torso and the legs) will go. To do this, put the clothes on yourself or whoever you're making the outfit for, and figure out where this point needs to be. 

If you can get all-black hooded onesies, this will be a lot easier because you'll automatically know where to draw the v-off. 

2. Apply the glow-in-the-dark paint

Start by doing one side of the hood and then allow it to dry before you flip it over and do the other side. Then, draw the long straight line that goes down the body. 

When you're doing your arms, you want to start the arms at the highest possible point you can, which is right at the base of the hood.

Once you do one arm, you need that side to match the other, so I just put a little mark for myself on the shoulder and the cuff to know where to go, and filled in the line. 

Tip: the paint shrinks up a little bit when it dries, so you want to make it thicker and wider than you actually want.

Glow-in-the-dark spiderweb costume

1. Paint the spiderwebs

Create one long line and then, like a pizza, divide it up and draw some slice shapes. Paint some little spider web lines, as we did on the Vampirina dress.

Just in between each of those little pizza slices, you're going to want to connect the lines with small curves. Start a point, curve down and meet the next one at the same point, so they look connected. 

Once you do one spiderweb on the bottom left of your dress, you're going to want to kind of anchor it with one on the top right. The design is basically a balancing game, take a step back and look at what the top needs. 

Glow-in-the-dark Halloween costume tutorial

That is how you make three awesome glow-in-the-dark Halloween costumes. They are so easy to make, and the paint is so impactful. It looks so cool during the day, and at night, it glows in the dark.

Let me know what you think of this tutorial and whether you’ll try out making glow-in-the-dark DIY costumes this Halloween!