Recent Glass Paintings by Teresa Young



Here is a selection of my latest paintings, which are on glass for a change.
 

 

 



 
 

 

 

How I Create A Glass Painting

First, I prepare the glass for the paint by using a prep fluid I buy at Michael's and let it dry overnight.
For the next step, I sometimes prepare a design in advance and draw it on a white piece of paper which I put behind the glass as a guide (only works with clear glass this way...). And you can also draw on the glass with permanent ink that is not too slippery. Just make sure that the liquid leading completely covers your guide lines... The other side effect of drawing directly on the glass is that you see the lines through the other side, which I don't like, so I don't do that myself.
-Usually though, I play it by ear and do the drawing using the liquid leading that I apply to the glass. The initial drawing is very, very simple, like the photo at left, because applying the coloured paint always goes over the initial lines, so I have to redo the lines again after the coloured glass panes are done. This also makes sure that the leading ends up being raised like real leading which increases its similarity to real stained glass visually.
I have pen tips that I screw onto the tops of the liquid leading bottles I buy at Michaels.  These allow me to create much finer lines than what the bottles of liquid leading create originally. I bought the pen tips at Michaels as well, but I have no idea what they are designed to be used for normally though.
I usually buy frames with glass on sale and use those myself. What I've done is remove all the backing from the glass in the frame, then put glazier's putty (available from some hardware stores, it's grey in colour and dries fairly stiff over time) over the edges of the glass and then put small pieces of wood over the putty and paint the wood black. Once the putty dries, the wood is securely held in place, just like a window frame...
Sometimes, (when I have the time and money), I put another layer of glass over the back of the glass again, with special glass that filters ultravoilet light out to preserve an especially good glass work that I want to hang in a west facing window that get a lot of light. Direct sunlight when the sun is especially bright can fade the colours over time, so this helps a lot. But it can get expensive.

Back to the process itself.
I have many bottles of glass paint that I use for the painting, you can use qtips and toothpicks to refine what you've put down on the glass for coloured areas, I used to use the toothpicks a lot to remove bubbles in the glass paint layer at the beginning, but now, I find the even side to side motion I use works just as well. But this stroke has to be very even in motion to avoid bubbles, and never, ever shake the bottles or it will take overnight for the bubbles to settle out of the paint. Otherwise, you end up with a paint that ensures bubbles over every square inch. Which, now that I think it over, could an interesting effect in itself!
I use many layers and overlapping colours to create shading and visual interest and also to avoid that plastic/fake look that I dislike so much!
Different paints give varying levels of opacity and translucency, so you've got a large range to play with. I use cameo ivory and white pearl for dotting a lot because they are fairly opaque and give nice effects.
Once the paint layers have dried, I use liquid leading over top to clean up the painting and smooth out the finished product. I use it to balance the composition if necessary, and correct any air bubbles I might have missed by putting in new divisions of paints to hide them. I add different colours to the new panes so that it looks like I planned the 'accidents' as part of the original composition.  I often end up with something new and totally different that I like much, much more.
Once I'm satisfied, I leave the painting dry for a week, and then varnish it with glass varnish (two coats), to protect it from the elements and allow it to be washed with gentle soap and water in the future.

Slate Blue is pretty transparent and it's great for shading
other colours because it gives a nice, attractive shadowy effect, as does charcoal black and champagne.
Amber is one of my favourite underpainting colours because it works with pretty well everything as well as by itself.

Rose is especially beautiful and mixes well as well...  High colour paints that work well are morning glory, aqua, fresh lime, sapphire, ruby red and so on. But I'm pretty careful with those, because the larger the area of high colour, and the smoother it is, the faker it looks.  I also use crackle a lot to create texture in larger areas, it work extremely well and gives a close match to a lot of stained glass textures.

As you can see by the glass painting at right, I used a lot of very bright red in large panes in the composition. To combat the fake plastic look that I initially ended up with, I used dotting of another paint colour to texture the panes and give visual interest. It also made it reminiscent of pointellism or ink drawing by using the dots, which made it attractive.
Putting crackle over a paint layer that is dry, cracks the paint evenly, giving one style of effect. Putting it on a wet layer, cracks it so that the edges get extra paint stuck in it, so it's almost like bolding the broken edges, putting wet paint over dry crackle areas give pools of darker paint in the cracks, and put wet paint over wet crackle layers gives the same effect as layering them in the opposite order. There are other types of glass paints like crackle that give textures available, but I haven't really experimented with them much as they don't appear to work as well as crackle does...
Once the paint layers have dried, I use liquid leading over top to clean up the painting and smooth out the finished product. I use it to balance the composition if necessary, and correct any air bubbles I might have missed by putting in new divisions of paints to hide them. I add different colours to the new panes so that it looks like I planned the 'accidents' as part of the original composition.  I often end up with something new and totally different that I like much, much more.
Then, I leave the painting dry for a week, and varnish it with glass varnish (two coats), to protect it from the elements and allow it to be washed with gentle soap and water in the future.

When Things Don't Go As Planned

 

I've been trying to capture my new direction of painting on glass digitally and have met with all sorts of problems.  So this has become my new 'thing' or quest for lack of a better term...

In trying different approaches, I find I get mixed results.  A white background allows me to eliminate some of the contrast issues, but I lose some of the depth, luminousity and texturized feel that so adds to the effect of the artworks on glass...

I would like to do it justice, so I did some research and I don't think that this is a new problem at all.  Even in books and articles I've seen on the internet it appears that a lot of detail is lost due to the high constract inherent in glass art. 

The human eye appears to adjust to it automatically seem to see the piece bettter than a camera can capture it!

And somehow, even when I get darks and shadows in the clearer parts of the pieces, it seems to have more depth than the ones with the flat backgrounds...

So, I'm adding a small gallery here of what I've been experimenting with lately with in painting directly on glass for your viewing pleasure!

 

The four pieces below actually inspired the title of this blogpost, I was trying to change a frame on a large piece I did in May and cracked the glass, so I found out that if I was very careful, I can peel the art off of the glass, prepare new glass to adhere the piece to and refinish the piece.  Essentially, I cut this one into four sections because the painting got cut by the glass breaking in the first place.  Four for one, not a bad trade in my mind!

Here's the original piece, which no longer exists in the larger form:

 Images by Teresa Young:

1. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 22 June 2010;  2. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 23 June 2010;  3. Untitled Glass Art - 2 5"x7" pieces - 18 June 2010;  4. Fauvist Fantasy - 8"x10" - 21 June 2010;  5. Serenity - 12"x14" - 16 May 2010;  6. Untitled Glass Art - 20"x24" - 2 May 2010;  7, 8, 9 & 10.  Final Glass Fragments - 8"x10".

Learning To Paint On Glass

 

Over the years, I've dabbled in a lot of mediums and foundations to create artworks.  I've painted jewelry boxes, candles, wood of all sorts, lecture stands, jackets, motorcycles and even lamps! (I learned how to use an airbrush to paint a motorcycle, it was a lot of fun.)

When I bought a house seven years ago, the front foyer window had this horrible painting of bluebirds on it that were rendered by an amateur using a media I had never seen before. 

It was painted over the double paned window with a plastic semi-opaque paint that gave the appearance of stained glass.  Or tried to...

This was something I sat down and thought about, and I realized that not only did I want to remove the offending 'artwork' on the entrance-way window in my new house, but I wanted to do it again myself. Properly.

It seems to me that this medium has a lot of promise to it.  It doesn't suffer from some of the limitations of stained glasswork but it gives a similar effect.  The glass doesn't have to be cut, meaning you can include a lot of details that are possible in traditional glasswork.  It's really 'glass painting' as opposed to stained glass art, and it can be done for a fraction of the cost.  And it wouldn't look cheap if you did it right.

After physically removing the old 'artwork', I set out to find out about my new prospective medium by looking on the internet and checking out art and craft stores.  I found out that it's used mostly to create suncatchers and to create fake stained glass pieces on mirrors and windows (in a limited way)...  By fake stain glass, I mean that the craftperson doing the work will use a pattern that simulates a stained glass pattern and follow it as closely as possible...  This really wasn't what I had in mind for me!

I've never been good at following someone else's patterns, my first painting at eight years old was in oils and I used the paints from a paint by numbers kit my aunt had given me to do something original... No copying for me!

So I bought some of the paint and blanks (wax paperlike plastic sheets) to practice on so that I could get a feel for the limitations and also figure out what I could do with it.  I found that it dries quickly, but takes a day to clear out to the final colour.  Meaning you can't see what colours you are really working with at the time you do the piece.  This just makes it more challenging!

I tried out my abstract, pattern based pen drawing as 'patterns' to see how they would look, and I was delighted with results. 

I'm a pretty prolific and quick artist, so I can create some pieces quite quickly.  The new medium and it's drying limitations slowed me down immensely.  And I found that I needed more strength in my hands to get a straight line, maybe the person who did the original work on the window was fighting this when they got the wavy lines on the bluejays...

To combat the lack of details in the lines, I bought more attachments for the simulated leading bottle I was using to apply the under-drawing to get finer control.  It helped, but it slowed down the process even more. 

This couldn't be helped, I wanted to be able to do the artwork to my normal standards and I wasn't going to cop out even if it meant way more work.

I also found out that the paint runs and clumps, so I had to be careful about the amount I applied to keep it from clumping up.  Even more unexpected, if I didn't run a toothpick through it after each colour was applied, it would bubble and that didn't look desirable at all.

Finally, I felt confident I could start on my 'new' window, I prepared it carefully so that the paint would adhere and I created many sheets of predried leading lines that I could apply to the window and anchors with wet leading as I did the work. 

First I had drawn a beautiful abstract pattern that I applied to the window to follow.

As I progressed, I found that the four foot by eighteen inches wide window ended up taking me a hundred hours or more to research, practice and paint.  The actual piece itself took over fifty hours!  Not a quick medium to work in, but it certainly gave me a unique result I was proud of.

I painted the window you see here in late 2005 and it never faded or chipped.  It was sold with my house last year and from the response I've seen to the piece over the years, I would say that people really like it....

So I've decided to give it another go and I've started on some new windows!

Since the landlord at the house I'm renting was all for the idea of me painting a few windows to practice the artform, I decided it was a great opportunity to refine the process.

I've started on new windows here, and unfortunately, it's really hard to photograph them well enough to get the full effect of the artwork.  The light from behind the window tends to skew the metering so you end up with a sillouhette effect which tones down the details.

On these new windows, I found that working with glass paint told me how much older I had gotten in the last six years.  My hand shook even more and I had to take it very slow to get the result I wanted.  But it was worth it, I've finished the left three windows and I'm working on the right side to pull the viewers eye over the left windows.  Sort of a flow of expression, it's working out quite well, even though I haven't finished the windows yet, it's given a beautiful result!

I even bought a digital SLR camera to improve the quality of my photos of them!