Nothing Glows Alone
A neon-lit night scene on near-black, where every light source is named with what it lights — so the colour lands on surfaces instead of floating as bright shapes. Five fields.
Two runs of the same template. The same three-source structure in a boatyard, and it holds - cyan rimming the back and the wet rail, the bar heater catching boot toecaps and the oil drum, the hand lamp lighting the hatch and the face from below. This run came out painterly rather than flat and graphic, which the template asks for and this one talked itself out of. Both are lit correctly; only one is in the stated style.
Three sources and all three do work: green rims the shoulder, hair and the back of the raised arm; magenta catches the counter lip, the pan, the ladles and the knuckles nearest it; the bowl lights the chin, the palm and the steam. The reference run put an enormous cyan disc directly behind its figure and gave the figure no rim light at all. Falloff behaves here - the green dies before the face, the magenta stops at the wrist. If anything it is darker than the template asks: nearer two thirds black than half.
Generated for this library
Input
Subject a noodle cook lifting a finished bowl off the
pass, one hand under it
Lights green sign disc behind: rims shoulder, hair, back
of the raised arm · magenta counter strip: catches
the counter lip, pan rim, knuckles · the bowl,
warm gold: lights chin, palm, rising steam
Place a cramped late-night kitchen - hanging ladles, a
stack of bowls, an extractor hood
Dark the ceiling, the wall behind the rack, below the
counter
Palette near-black; acid green, hot magenta, warm gold,
deep violet
Returned 1 illustration · 1:1 · near-black, neon-lit
sources three, all inside the frame, all doing work
rim green along the shoulder and the back of the arm,
brightest where the edge turns away
bounce magenta on the counter lip and on the knuckles
nearest it, gone by the wrist
warm gold under the chin and through the steam, falling
off within a hand's width of the bowl
dark ceiling and back wall left near-black, with no
detail invented to fill themYou fill in 5 fields — the braced lines at the top. Everything below them is fixed.
- 1The subject, and what they are doing
- 2The lights — each colour, where it is, and what it falls on
- 3The place, and three things in it
- 4What stays dark
- 5The palette
Nothing Glows Alone
Produce ONE image, 1:1: a night scene on near-black, lit by neon. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.
First — do you have the fields?
If any field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put all the questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then draw. Never fill a brace yourself: a value you invented is a value nobody asked for, and it will look exactly as considered as the ones they did give you.
Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.
The examples are only examples. If someone answers a question, use their answer; never fall back to the example because you prefer it.
If the fields are already filled in, ignore this and carry on.
Fields — replace these five lines only
- The subject, and what they are doing: {who, and the action}
- The lights — each colour, where it is, and what it falls on: {each source: the surfaces it hits}
- The place, and three things in it: {where, and what is there}
- What stays dark: {the areas the light does not reach}
- The palette: {a near-black, and three or four lit colours}
The lighting law
Neon work is not made of glowing shapes. It is made of surfaces that have been reached by a light. Get that backwards and you produce something bright and dead.
Every light source in the frame lights something. The fields name what. Its colour appears on those surfaces, strongest nearest the source.
Every lit surface traces back to a source in the frame. If a cheekbone is bright, you can point at the thing making it bright. There is no key light from off-screen, no general illumination, no ambient fill from nowhere.
A reference run of this style put an enormous cyan disc directly behind its figure — and gave the figure no rim light at all. It ran a magenta strip along a counter and left the counter unlit. It hung a lamp box on the wall and left the shelf beside it black. Every light was a shape, and the figure's actual modelling arrived from a source that was not in the picture.
Falloff
Light runs out, and quickly.
- Brightest within a hand's width of the source.
- Faded by an arm's length.
- Gone after that, into the ground colour.
Nothing is evenly lit. A surface that faces a light is bright at the near end and dark at the far end, on the same object.
The dark
The field names what stays dark, and it stays dark — near-black, with no detail invented to fill it and no lifted shadows.
Roughly half the frame should be at or near the ground colour. The dark is what makes the lit parts read as light.
How colour works here
- Form is modelled by which light reaches a surface, not by grey shading. A shoulder turns from green to black because the green light stops reaching it.
- Where two lights overlap, their colours mix on the surface.
- Shadows are not black — they are the colour of whatever weaker light still reaches them.
- Sources themselves are the only pure, saturated, near-white-cored areas.
Style
- Flat, sharp-edged shapes with clean gradients — graphic, not photographic and not painterly.
- Long angular highlights along edges; no soft airbrush blooms.
- A faint atmospheric haze around each source only, tight and controlled.
- Steam, smoke and dust take the colour of the light passing through them.
Never
- ✕ a bright shape that lights nothing
- ✕ a lit surface with no source you can point at
- ✕ key light from outside the frame
- ✕ even, ambient illumination
- ✕ grey shading used to model form
- ✕ black shadows with no colour in them
- ✕ a frame lit throughout with no dark left in it
- ✕ detail invented inside areas the fields put in shadow
- ✕ text of any kind
The result
A scene that is actually lit: three sources you can name, colour sitting on the surfaces each one reaches, and half the picture left in the dark so the other half means something.
The whole template, in one piece. The steps below are the entire workflow.
How to use it
- Copy the whole template with the button above.
- Replace the five FIELDS lines. Write the lights field as source, then colon, then the surfaces it hits — that colon is what turns a glow into lighting.
- Paste it into any image-capable agent or model, in one message. One run returns the scene.
- Point at each bright shape and ask what it lights. If the answer is nothing, it is a sticker, not a lamp.
What you swap
- The subject, and what they are doing
- a noodle cook lifting a finished bowl off the pass, one hand under it
- The lights — each colour, where it is, and what it falls on
- a green sign disc behind the cook: rims their shoulder, hair and the back of the raised arm · a magenta strip along the counter edge: catches the counter lip, the pan rim and the cook's knuckles · the bowl itself, warm gold: lights the underside of the cook's chin, their palm and the rising steam
- The place, and three things in it
- a cramped late-night kitchen — a rack of hanging ladles, a stack of bowls, an extractor hood
- What stays dark
- the ceiling, the back wall behind the rack, and everything below the counter
- The palette
- near-black ground; acid green, hot magenta, warm gold, deep violet
Before it runs
- Lights with jobs. 'Neon everywhere' produces bright shapes; 'a green disc that rims the shoulder' produces a lit picture.
- Something you are willing to leave black. Falloff only reads if there is somewhere for the light to run out.
- A subject with a raised or reaching action. Light describes form best across an arm, a shoulder, a lifted hand.
When to reach for it
Late-night food, music, games, anything that should feel electric after dark. Templates in this style ask for glowing neon and return gorgeous bright shapes that illuminate nothing — a magenta strip beside an unlit counter, a huge cyan disc behind a figure with no rim light on it.
What changes
- One night scene on near-black, lit entirely by sources inside the frame.
- Each light named with what it falls on, so its colour appears on real surfaces at real distances.
- Every highlight traceable back to a source you can point at — no key light arriving from off-frame.
- Falloff that behaves: bright where the light is close, gone a short way off, with the dark left properly dark.
- Colour doing the modelling, so form is described by which light reaches it rather than by grey shading.
Pairs with
- Every Path ArrivesA full-bleed storybook world you can actually travel through — every route joining two named places, and three sizes of thing so the eye lands before it wanders. Five fields.
- Nothing Leaves the ShapeA whole landscape built inside one silhouette on bare ground — with the container closed, so the shape still reads as itself from across a room. Five fields.
- One Pen, Not FiveA black-ink event poster on white — a scribbled scene, a fat brush headline, asides in the margins — with the tool count fixed so it reads as one hand. Six fields.