Glass Painting - my Dad!

So, this was something very different for me.  Glass Painting!   - I don’t mean painting o glass with those Vitrea paints, this technique is painted and fired making it permanent.

The piece is fired in between layers so once you are happy with a layer, you can fire it, then work on it again without risking the layer you’ve already done.

First I needed a photo to work from – I used this one of my Dad, taken about 30 years ago.

Black and white photos work best as you can then copy the shades.

The paint powder was mixed with gum Arabic to make it a good consistency for painting with.

I placed the photo under a piece of glass and painted on the outlines.

This then went into the kiln to bake at around 650 degrees.

Quite pleased with the outcome – it does resemble my Dad somewhat.

The next step was to work in a kind of reverse painting style, but covering the whole thing in paint and scraping back the light areas.

This was all very new to me, I have never done much art, but it was good fun.

There were quite a lot of scraping involved to get the light bits back to how light I wanted them.  

Then I textured the background – I could have removed the paint from the background, but I thought it looked quite nice with a criss-cross texture instead.

And this is my finished piece.

I am so pleased with it as it really does look like my Dad!

I am definitely trying this technique again.