Narrator: No, this isn't a neon sign. It's street art created in a way that tricks your eyes into believing it's glowing light. Adam Fujita, aka Adam Fu, has mastered the art of layering very specific colors in order to turn regular spray paint into something a little more luminescent. And while figuring out the technique to create this look, he has also mastered how to manipulate the human eye into seeing an entirely different material. But how does he do it?

All of his projects start on his iPad. He uses an illustration app called Procreate to play around with typography and lettering. Adam uses it to map out the placement and scale of the piece according to the size of the wall the project will live on. Once that's all done, Adam preps the materials he'll need once he's on-site. This means pulling all the colors he'll need and extra cans of those colors in case he runs out. For this mural, he has prepared seven different colors in the yellow and orange shade range. Then it's time to take the design and tools to the site.

Adam Fujita: My work always begins small. It always begins on paper or a napkin or the iPad, but it's meant to be outdoors. You know, my work, it came from the street, and ideally it should be on the street. And so I think that, having it in public, that's its most natural environment.

Narrator: He starts by creating a rough outline for the lettering. Usually, this is done with the darkest of the seven shades. For this piece, it's a red-orange color. This next step is vital to creating a faux glow around the sign. He calls this "dusting," and it creates the illusion of the glow that real neon light would have. Adam repeats this with a few layers of different colors in order to fully create this effect. Although neon light itself may appear to be only one color, our eyes actually perceive the glow as varying shades of the same color. Once he's happy with how the dusting looks, Adam begins working on the letters. The first layer he puts down is a dark but still vibrant yellow. This brings the letters back into focus. Then, Adam rewrites the same letters in black, but slightly off-center. It will create the illusion of a shadow.

Adam: It's not common, though, in neon signage. Neon would never cast a dark light out of its, the backside of itself, you know. It would cast a bright light. But what I realized was that that black shadow, it draws so much contrast that it adds to this quality that maybe the letters are floating above the surface.

Narrator: This trick of the eye is thanks to depth perception, which is the ability to see things in three dimensions and is how you judge how far away an object is. Adam goes back in with the same yellow as before to clean up the overlapping black lines. Then, he brings in the lighter, brighter yellow shade. When doing this, the neon effect begins to come together. But it isn't until he adds that final white line down the middle of the letters that the sign really glows. This mimics the most illuminated part of neon lights, making it appear brighter than the rest. That harsh, bright center of the sign is what really grabs your attention.

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