A guiding hand through the painting glass maze…

You’ll be amazed what painting glass will add to your work. To make it easier for you to choose the right paint for your stained glass project, I’ve written here about the different types of glass paints available, when best to use them, who makes them and where to buy them.

What exactly is glass paint?

Often called enamels or vitreous enamels, they are a mixture of metallic oxide pigments, flux and ground glass. They are used for surface decorating glass and are fired on permanently in a glass kiln. Their colour and opacity depends on the type of metal oxide used. As usual with painting glass, you need to use a mask – inhaling the dust is dangerous.

What types of glass paint are there?

There are masses of choice, and consequently lots of confusion! Broadly, they’re divided into two main categories: opaque (that you can’t see through) and transparent paints.

Painting glass with opaque paints.

Let’s talk about the opaque paints first. Firstly, there’s a range of various browns, black, and greys in what’s often called ‘glass pigments’. Reusche is expensive, but probably supply the best of this type of stained glass paint. These paints are what you see used in church stained glass windows for drapery and facial features. Sounds dull, dull, DULL, but if you imagine some of the bright colours in your stained glass art work partially covered with dramatic glass painting, you’ll understand how exciting this type of paint is. Have a look at the John Piper window here – see how painting glass has created an almost 3-D effect? And how the black paint actually makes the colours – particularly the yellow – stand out more vividly?

The second type of opaque paints – more commonly called enamels – are coloured. There’s a huge range of colours and they vary between manufacturers, who each have several different types of enamel. Some are high firing – suitable for use at fusing temperatures, some are lead-free – for tableware, and some are made for architectural applications and withstanding the weather. These are some tests I made of Range 34 Ferro enamels. You can see the colours are bright and varied. They’re best used in situations where privacy is needed, or where the light source is from in front – rather than through – them. Johnson Matthey also makes three ranges of opaque enamels for architectural use.

Painting glass with transparent enamels.

glass painting Transparent paints also come in a wide range of colours, and are best used for architectural glass, with light coming through the glass. The complaint I always hear from my students about transparent enamels, is that they are wishy-washy. They can be layered up and fired repeatedly to deepen their colour, but really it’s best not to compare them to coloured glass. You’ll never ever achieve that gorgeous depth of colour or transparency that we all love, but they do have a charm and benefits of their own. What painting glass with transparents does is to allow you to change colour within one piece of glass without the need for lead.
Just like the opaques, there are lots of manufacturers – I’ve used Ferro and Heraeus and prefer the colours achieved with the latter, although Ferro do a fantastic blue. This commission of mine used Heraeus transparents.