Wow guys. Welcome to the 1960's! What you are describing became so common that S&W started putting a red plastic insert in their revolver front sights. I had a friend that carefully made little divots in his older Highway Patrol man sights and filled those dots with glow in the dark paint in the late 1970's or so. If you had the S&W revolver with the red plastic front sight insert and the white box out lined rear notch you could go to a fairly fast flash front sight picture "Yep red blob on target and in white box, pull trigger"
Used to know guys back in the day that simply swiped "White out" or "Liquid Paper" on their front sight with the supplied brush......it suddenly occurred to me that many of the younger shooters have no idea what I am talking about! There were little bottles of paint in the common colors of office paper for making corrections with when all we had were steel lettered type writers. If you found a type writer you generally found a bottle of one or the other in the desk drawer the typewriter was closest too.
I used to do something similar with the M-16A1 in that I would cut a sliver of glow in the dark tape (aka Ranger Eyes, we would get sheets of the stuff about index card sized to cut up and sew on the back of hats or cammo bands for helmets to make "eyes" the guy following you could see from a few yards away, after a day of exposer to sun light they were visable almost all night. We also once made a star chart on the ceiling of our barracks room to help teach major constalations and got ragged about it )and place it on the front sight tower vertically facing me and another sliver horizontally below the rear sight on the carrying handle. The rear one was too close to really focus on but in the dark the two formed a sort of interrupted inverted T that allowed one to quickly engage 18x24 inch things out to 25 yards or so with some hope of hitting when there was no where near enough light to see the sights. I did know one guy that carefully painted on fifth of his M-16 A1 front sight red with model paint after he zeroed so he could back off two front sight clicks and see the red or click back up and be zeroed again. Also saw Ranger Eye tape stuck on an M60 GPMG front sight and then the sides blackened with Sharpie so only a thin verticle line is left.
Also knew 1911A1 useds that painted a small white stripe just to the fireres side of the teenie tinie front sight on a GI pistol. I claimed it made the front sight more visable in low light and another claimed it gave him a reference while the muzzle was elevated and when he lowered the gun enough the white disappeared it was time to shoot.
Police that were a little gun savy and the general run of "gun nuts" were very much into the sort of front sight painting here described by the OP.
What's old is new again. A new generation just needs a bit of education.....