The “emission” setting is what you are looking for on the material if you want a glow.
--
By the way, you talk about transparency, but there are 2 kinds of transparency.
I can whip up a donut because I’ve been using Blender for years. Also, a lot of times you can snag textures off the internet:
The chocolate glaze material I got from blendkit: (Chocolate by Pritam Mondal)
The donut cake material I made myself — it’s just a mix of Voronoi and Noise nodes affecting the bump (normal) and driving a Color Ramp with a couple shades of chocolate.
The wood is a (cheesy) seamless wood texture I snagged online years ago from a wood flooring seller. (I used it because it was a quick-n-easy slap-a-texture-on-it solution.)
The napkin is just a piece of a picture of napkins someone was selling online.
Again, each picture is used to drive both color and bump for the material.
The lighting is a simple setup: HDRI + a bright back light + a relatively dim fill light near the camera.
You cannot make a donut “glow” and still look like an edible donut. Instead you cheat and just make the donut brightly-lit and add a glow around it, complete with some useful darkness in the surrounding image.
(Honestly, that poo donut took more work, and it still doesn’t look quite right. But for a gag I already spent more time on it that I needed to.)
Don’t worry, though. You are well on your way to making sense of all this and producing some cool stuff yourself. Just keep learning and playing with it.
OK, I messed with the Alpha and Transmission settings (Alpha=.5 and Transmission=.25) and the glass monkey head looks more like glass. I appreciate this info and will keep it in mind in future work. 
Now I have to work on the donut. Will try to look at it tomorrow.
OK, I have a bunch of questions related to this:
BTW the glowing donut in the model I posted was intended to teach people like me how to create objects that glow/emit. I thought about something like a neon sigh when doing that exercise.
Since you are a well-informed Blender user, do you recommend updating to Blender 5.2 LTS?
Blendkit is obnoxious about only providing access via the Blender interface. Follow the instructions at that website to install and enable the Blendkit extension.
Then, while in Blender, open the N-Panel and use the extension to find objects and materials that interest you. Simply drag and drop them into your scene to use them!
By default Blendkit stores everything in a folder in your home directory titled “blenderkit_data”. That drives me absolutely bonkers because I keep all my stuff in a directory titled “Blender”, which makes auto-complete at the command-line bork. You can change the location in the Preferences dialog for the extension (or add-on, if using it with older versions of Blender).
Absolutely.
CAVEATS:
I still do a lot of stuff in 3.6 (else 4.5 if 3.6 can’t hack it)… but that’s just so I have assets that will work with older Blender versions should I want that. Call me crufty, I guess.
— meaning it is no longer backwards-compatible with older versions.
Don’t read any of this as a reason not to upgrade to the latest version of Blender.
BTW, you can have multiple versions of Blender installed on your system.
I’m actually working on a script that will automagically open the most apropos version re any given file, but that is a topic for another thread.
…be awesome? Like I said, it strikes me a delicious. IDK why.
I swear I don’t regularly eat radioactive objects.
Tutorial videos, web forums, books or other things are great but they are no substitute for hands-on practice.
My advice: Watch a few tutorials, read some web forums or a chapter from a book then, after you have had a chance for the information to sink in, put them down. Pick up Blender and start fiddling.
Look around your desk and pick an object. Something simple. I see a pencil on my desk.
Pick up that pencil and look at it. I mean LOOK at it! Look at the size, shape and texture. Think about the pencil. Think about how you would make it.
A pencil is just a long cylinder. A hexagonal cylinder, maybe. It comes to a point on one end. There’s a metal ferrule on the other end. Another cylinder, right? Then there is an eraser on the end of the ferrule. That would be a half-sphere, I guess.
Do just that, in Blender. Make a cylinder. Subdivide it, crosswise, close to one end. Bring all the end vertices to a point. (Merge them together.) Add another cylinder on the opposite end, to make the ferrule. Stick a half-sphere on the end of that. Viola! A pencil!
Don’t worry about making it look perfect. Just get the shape and size right. Worry about color and texture, later. You are only teaching yourself how to break an object in the real world down into its primitive shapes then create them in Blender. That’s your main goal, right now. Don’t worry about anything else until you’re satisfied with your first steps.
Next, put on some basic materials. Yellow for the main part of the pencil. Light brown for the pointed end and a little bit of gray-black for the lead. The ferrule is silver and the eraser is pink.
Do not worry about perfection. Just make it good enough that the viewer will know it’s a pencil. Don’t worry about textures, UV-maps and all that jazz. Just make a basic pencil.
Render it out. AirDrop it to your iPhone. Go get a cup of coffee or a bottle of beer or whatever. Sit and look at your picture and decide what you like and don’t like. Put Blender down. Forget about Blender for a good day or two. Just think about our pencil rendering.
After that, go get those tutorial videos, those websites or those books and do some more research. Take another crack at redesigning your pencil.
Re-render, analyze, research, rework and repeat until you’re done.
You can read all the books, watch all the videos in the world. You can take any class from the best teacher in the world but, unless you get your hands on a computer and MAKE something with Blender, it won’t amount to a hill of beans.
So, get out there! Show me how you make a pencil with Blender! 
I think your suggestion is good. Certainly, a good way to start learning. So I went off and started working on things. However, I see that I have some things I need to go off and figure out. Like:
So, as you can see, I have a lot to figure out/learn to address the creation of the “full” pencil. Again, I think this was a good suggestion because it will make me go off and learn how to some interesting and basic things that will be part of any model you want to create.
I can answer some of those.
Use a second cylinder with more sides. If you want, you can join them into a single object at the end to make it easier to manipulate the finished pencil, an object can have multiple loose parts inside it.
That one is a bit more advanced, but here is a way.
1- Delete the face at the tip of the pencil. Add extra edges to each side of the pencil using the “loop cut” tool. Once this is done, add a circle with the same number of sides as the pencil and put it in front of the hole.
2- Select the edges of the hexagonal hole and the circle, then use the “bridge” tool to connect them.
3- This is getting there, but it’s not perfect yet, as the newly created section is a bit hexagonal and angular while it should be smooth. To fix this, select the vertices of the hexagon and move them to create the shape of a sharpened pencil. Once this is done, you can select those edges and use “mark sharp” on them, this will ensure they stay visually as a sharp line even if you set the object to shade smooth.
4- You might need to try making this pattern more or less steep to find the sweet spot where the sharpened section is smooth.
5- Extrude the circular tip, then use “merge at center” to combine the new section into a sharp tip. I would also add a few loop cuts to the sharpened part, that tends to make the shading look better on a cone.
You do that by creating multiple material slots on the object. Then, you go in edit mode and you can use the assign button to put those materials on selected faces. This is even better than just colors, as you can give different parts roughness and metallic values too.
You, pretty much, nailed it! 
Depending on your intent and what kind of scene you want to create, that pencil might be good to go! If it is meant to be a prop in a larger scene, you might be able to use it as-is. If it is meant to be part of a still life where you need detail, of course, it needs work but those details are for the artist to decide.
I’d say that you’ve “completed your assignment” with flying colors! Good work!
Couple of silly questions:
I am still off working on a better version of the pencil. I am using this as a method to expand my understanding of how to use more features in Blender.
I just selected them and moved them by eye. For better consistency, I selected the corresponding vertices on every side and moved them all at once. There are few enough in my example that it was possible for me to make a nice curve by eye.
This one is optional and might not even be needed, but it can help ensure a better result.
If you have a cone with very long faces that go all the way, it can look ugly when the model is set to shade smooth, because every face starts wide and ends narrow and that’s a bit hard for the rendering to make look good. Adding those loop cuts helps by shortening the faces into easier sections that aren’t as deformed.
You don’t see it here because there is no texture, but it could also cause problems with textures, with each face being so lopsided.
In other words, stretched and lopsided faces aren’t the best for rendering.
Here is the same model, without and with cuts.
A very easy way would be to grab the center of each flat edge and drag with proportional editing. My quick model has:
That gives a total of 36 vertices around the pencil. I added a circle with 36 vertices and dragged it down and scaled it to the way etn249 did, then selected both edge loops and Ctrl+E → Bridge Edge Loops.
By subdividing an odd number of times that gave me an even number of faces on each side of the pencil, meaning there was an edge down the center of each side of the pencil.
So I selected the center point on each side, then turned on Proportional Editing and selected a spherical drop-off.
My pencil is aligned up and down the Z axis, so I just pressed G to grab and Z to constrain to the Z axis, then used the mouse wheel to adjust the falloff radius to just inside the corners of the pencil’s sides:
At this point I pressed Esc to cancel the grab and reoriented the pencil to better be able to see the curve of the shape I was going to give it. Again pressing G and Z I moved the points until it was more-or-less where I thought it looked good, clicked, then looked it over.
I had to try a couple times to get it right. (Remember, you can always Ctrl+Z to undo if you make a mistake.)
(For example, I first tried with a sharp, then a linear falloff, which was dumb, I guess, but once my brain kicked in to gear I selected the spherical falloff and made it work right.)
I would approach this problem like in the real world - use a pencil sharpener. Create an object with the appropriate shaped cone recessed into it and use it as a boolean cutter on the pencil. Retopologise if necessary.
OK guys, maybe I am getting in over my head (us older guys can get lost 
). I went off and built a new model with separate parts for the eraser, cylinder, pencil, sharpened portion and lead point. I then use the crtl+J to join them. Not too bad but am having some additional issues that I am trying to research and understand.
As an example, I created the pencil as an octagon and then extruded it. However, at some point it is winding up very round. Perhaps I used the bevel tool and created too many edges. I will continue to work on it from time to time. The real idea here is the “learning process”. I am liking Blender and think it is a VERY powerful tool but, in some cases, very difficult to learn.
I will keep trying though.
…very difficult to learn
Yes. Yes it is.
But worth it, IMHO.
Another silly question/issue: I have created an object and then added text to its surface (used Ctrl+J to merge them). Now I wanted to do some other things with the “combined” object. As I move the combined object, the text at sometimes disappears. I also tried to copy an past the combined object from the current file to another file and it did not work. However, when I try the same thing by combining two cubes (as an example) I can copy and paste the combined object from one file to another.
I am thinking that this might be because it is the text that I merged to the face of the original object that is causing the problem and that the text is what is causing the problem not the object joinging process.
Could it be z-fighting?
If you place flat objects in a way they overlap, this happens, because it’s not clear which one is on top of which. You would need to offset one slightly to fix it.
Please post images with questions to provide more context.
Thanks for your reply. I think what you are saying is truly possible. I will do some more testing to try to “prove” that is the real problem.
I am really trying to learn Blender and am “experimenting” with some features to try to learn the tool better. I am currently using 5.1.2.
OK, here is another problem that I do not seem to be able to fix. I am using Blender 5.1.2 and have joined two objects (in this case the heart (which is in the outlines as a cube) and the text. I would like to be able to “unjoin” them. I looked this up and found an answer that said go to Edit Mode, select the objects and then use the short cut P. I did that but do not seem to be able to unjoin them.
Hope someone can tell me how to do that.
Here is a screenshot of the joined objects.
