(Click image to enlarge)

Ever since i moved into my mid-terraced house and noticed the sad and plain looking sun window above the front door, i wanted to put a nice piece of stained glass in there as a replacement as a nice focal point for the front of the house.

I was looking at getting a piece of stained glass done professionally, but was then scared off by some of the prices that i was being quoted.  My fiancee suggested that i have a go at doing it myself and seeing that i am ok at art i decided to give it a try; now i haven’t done any sort of stained glass work before and i looked at it with a daunting enthusiasm, and seeing that the piece of glass above my front door was 80 inches x 40 inches in size - it would be a big task.

I contemplated what sort of work i should do on the glass and wracked my brain for a few days thinking of what images i could paint, i decided on doing a stained glass image of Glastonbury Tor (seeing that it is my spiritual home) with a celtic knot border around it.  I chose to buy a solvent based glass paint made by Marabu and also used their stained glass black liner that you buy in a tube, i decided not to use lead strips as i wanted the stained glass work to have a more free-hand personal touch to it.

Well my progress so far via the image at the top of this post shows where i am at the moment, it has taken me about 2 weeks to finish applying all the black lining and to paint in the celtic knot border, i hit a bit of a dilemma the other night with how i should apply the paint for the mainly large area’s in the centre of the image, so i got a bit of advice from the ‘Stained Glass Town Square’ forum website and one kind person suggested that i either airbrush the paint on or use a small foam roller; i chose to use the foam roller and did a few test runs last night on a spare piece of glass and the effect came out perfect, there was no brush stroke-like smearing on the glass that i had a problem with whilst using a brush, so i think over the weekend i will get stuck into it and get more of the work done.

I will publish another post when the stained glass is finished and fitted above my front door; in the mean time if you also enjoy creating stained glass images then i would be glad to hear from you.

 Cheers ~ Dave

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 9:44 am and is filed under Day to day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.