Stained Glass-ish Window Or: How to Draw and Paint on Glass

This is my alternative to stained glass windows! you can draw and paint on glass, there are even glittery pens for glass!

The things you'll need are:

1.a pane of glass. (go to charity shops/thrift stores, and you can take the glass out of the frames of old paintings) 2. a large piece of paper, at least the same size of your piece of glass 3. smaller pieces of paper 4. paintbrushes-small ones 5. pens & pencils 6. Glass pens (i.e pens that are made for writing on glass, not pens which are made out of glass) of various colours. These tend to be opaque 7. paints for glass. These tend to be transparent 8. blue tack (or other method of sticking your glass to the piece of paper.

The first thing you'll want to do is sketch out a few designs, until you're happy with what you want in the picture and where. If you want inspiration for what stained glass windows actually look like, you can look on the internet, just search "stained glass window" in your preferred search engine. Alternatively you could go to some local religious building, sometimes they have stained glass windows. I went for the (not so) classic design of a rainbow with some flying saucers, and divided up the rest of the image into funky looking shapes. I would recommend using nice bold images with solid outlines. this will make it easier once you come to draw/ paint your

When you're happy with your design, you can draw it full one -to-one scale on your large piece of paper. It's best to do this in pencil if you want to be able to rub out and change things.

Now, the good thing about glass is that it is transparent, so you can blue tack the piece of paper to the glass, with the side you want to see facing in. then you can just start tracing the outlines. Use all the parts that you want to fill in with the pens first, and use the paint afterwards. Both the paint and the pens take a little while to dry, so be really careful not to smudge anything.

Enjoy your lovely new glass painting!