How to Transform your Work with Stain Glass Painting
Stain glass painting opens up an infinite number of creative doors for you – once you get the hang of it you’ll be able to add detail, texture and colour to your glass artwork. Never again will you be hemmed in by the restrictions of lead work…
You’ve done the groundwork by choosing the right paint for your painting glass project, and followed my stain glass painting instructions and mixed a perfect batch of paint – so now you’re ready to start painting. Starting with line work is best, especially for beginners, as it can be fired first to give you a permanent reference point for any further wild experimenting you do!
What you need - glass painting checklist:
- Glass palette
- Palette knife
- Water
- Glass paint
- Gum Arabic
- Pipette
- Glass paint brushes – the thin brushes are known as ‘tracing brushes’ – size 3&5 are good for beginners
- A light box
- Bridge or armrest
Step one: Clean your glass
Glass paint will gather in blobs if the glass is dirty or greasy. You can clean it with alcohol – isopropyl is marvellous, but equally good is to a smear of your mixed paint on a tissue and rubbed over your glass.
Step two: Identify correct side
This only applies to the combination of coloured enamels and float glass – the enamels change colour if painted on the tinned (wrong) side. So how do you know which side is the ‘tin’ side? You can buy a short wave UV flashlight and look at your glass in the dark.
Step three: Charge your brush
Add some water to the edge of your mixed paint until it’s the consistency of thick evaporated milk. It’s crucial to get this right – my students often try to start stain glass painting with paint that’s too dry and find that they run out of paint or their lines are uneven. Too thick an application will result in blobby paint that blisters in the firing. Too thin and it fires off.
Step four: Start stain glass painting!
Traditionally people did their tracing (line work) by following a cartoon under their glass, but this may not suit you if you work in a more spontaneous manner – you choose. Hold the brush in a perpendicular position gently between forefinger and thumb and rest your palm on the bridge. Off you go! Don’t expect to get it right first time, it takes time to get used to painting on glass. Try pressing lightly and using just the tip of the brush. Then try moving the brush quickly and slowly, to get an idea of the different marks you can make.
This photo shows glass artist Mark Angus using the whole length of the brush to make a stroke. Have a go at that too. See how far you can go without running out of paint. As water dries quickly, you’ll have to learn to keep going until you’ve finished – once the paint has dried it’s difficult to seamlessly add to it with wet glass paint.
Step five: Correct or enhance lines with a needle
You can easily tidy up lines with a needle pressed into a brush handle. I don’t tend to bother – they can end up looking forced and over-worked. But working into your lines with a needle to enhance your stain glass painting is a different matter! You can really have fun with this – scratch patterns in or add detail – for example making hair ‘hairier’.
Step six: Final clean
Greasy fingerprints will fire in permanently, so you need to make sure your glass is free of them and any unwanted smears of paint. You’re now ready to do your initial firing.
Step seven: Fire your glass
Assuming it's simple glass paint mixed with water, I'd recommend the following (first figures in C, second in F):
Segment 1. 300/570 ph to 660(matt)-675(shiny) /1220-1250. Soak 5 mins.
Segment 2. Full to 560/1040. Soak 5 mins.
Segment 3. 10/50ph to 530/986. No soak. Off.
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