Stained Glass Tracing

Stained Glass Painting – Stained Glass Tracing

Here’s where you can post your questions about Stained Glass Tracing.

For other questions, please see here:

• Mixing Paint
• Silhouetting
• Shading
• Painting with Oil
• Firing
• Other

Note This: for main details about Stained Glass Tracing, please see Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the e-book. There are also many downloadable projects where you will discover more about stained glass painting.

Stained Glass Lettering

Elsewhere on this site, Ivo de Croock from Antwerp, Belgium, mentions that he discovered an article we had written for the US magazine, Glass Patterns Quarterly. It’s all about lettering, and you can find it here.

And Ivo also asks about painting black letters onto stained glass, and how to do this really accurately.

It’s certainly possible to use a computer-generated stencil.

However, it’s certainly also possible to do it by hand. Here, for example, you see some damage to the lettering of a stained glass window in a chapel:

Damaged lettering in a stained glass window

In this instance, we were asked to paint a copy (rather than to use glue to edge-bond the broken fragments). So we removed the glass and took it to our studio.

We set down the lettering with calligraphic precision. We painted an undercoat. We copy-traced the design:

Copy-trace the design with extreme precision

At this point we used a stick to correct tiny inaccuracies. Then we reinforced the lines as you see we’ve started doing here:

Reinforce the copy-traced lines

Once again, we used a stick to correct any minor inaccuracies.

Then it was time to fill in the lettering. The paint was thicker and darker than the paint we’d used to copy-trace and reinforce, but, working on such a small scale, it was by no means as thick as the kind of paint we’d use for silhouettes (because, with that degree of thickness, we wouldn’t have had the control that we required).

Once the paint had dried, we picked around it once again:

Use a stick to clean up around the edges of your lettering

Once fired, we returned the new lettering to its rightful place:

And finally we installed our forgery

The whole process calls for patience, good eye-sight, concentration, a good understanding of how glass paint behaves, and excellent hand-eye co-ordination.

And time.