Etching Glass With a Rotary Tool

Decided to make this tutorial about etching glass with a rotary tool. Had no idea how it would work out but I'm quite pleased with the result. Usually I work with wood so figured this would be a nice project for Beyond the Comfort Zone contest since I haven't had any experience in working with glass.

Step 1:

You will need a printer to print out your designs which you will later trace on the glass. My friend made these in Photoshop with a 10 degree curve so they would end up straight when transferred to glass. You can just print out anything and trace it but then your lines will look a bit crooked on the glass because of the curvature.

Other stuff you need is a pair of scissors, masking tape, rotary tool and diamond tip bits. I bought my bit set for 5$ on ebay.

Step 2:

Cut out your picture and place it in a glass. Secure it with masking tape so it doesn't move.

Step 3:

Securely grip the glass in your hand. Grab the rotary tool like a pen and start tracing the image. Sadly I couldn't take a picture of how I'm actually holding both the glass and the tool but it should be fairly simple to understand by looking at the pics.

Step 4:

Outlines traced and paper inside removed. You can opt to finish at this point.

Step 5:

Filling the insides of the trace. I found that having a dark background makes it much more easy to see what you're doing.

Hope you like the tutorial and have fun etching!