I'm a middle aged man with a young family and have taken a deep interest in painted stained glass. I've relied heavily on your shared experience and instruction. I love your voice and tempo. I dont see many younger glass painters , or older for that matter, so am trying to plant seeds with the kids. Thank you for all you've done!
Hello, Jack - I'm glad the video was helpful. I'm also glad you found and joined our free Substack. I don't know what you know already but if you go to glasspaintersmethod.substack.com/ you'll see two tabs. One called "Techniques", the other called "Restoration". Each is its own series, one covering the key techniques (right from the basics like choosing and cutting the right glass), the other covering many of those techniques in action as we restore a beautiful set of 19th century stained glass windows. If you have the time, and if one or both of the topics are more or less new to you, it's worth starting at the beginning, and reading / watching forward. Anytime you have a question we can help with, send us an email via Substack or a comment there, and we'll always tell you what we know.
@@stephenbyrne7169 I am grateful for your response. As a beginner, I have previously worked as an art teacher in public schools for six years, following which I was activated for military service and subsequently retired after serving for 30 years. Given my current situation, I have ample time and resources to embark on a new journey, and I am utilizing all available resources to learn as much as possible. I appreciate your efforts in providing valuable resources and information, which I have found to be informative and well-presented. I intend to continue following your work and remain receptive to any insights you may offer. Thank you for your time and consideration. Best regards, Jack
A few months ago,I got it into my head that I'd like to have a go at painting on glass and make stuff. I bought some paint etc from 'Creative Glass Guild', a case of 'all the gear no idea'. This vid was fascinating ! - I better get myself onto a course!!!!
Thanks: that's wonderful you liked the demonstration. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll hear when we launch a new series of free posts and videos: www.glasspaintersmethod.com/grip/
@Pauline and Peter :You won't go wrong by choosing Stephen & David 2 help u learn the Art of Glass Painting. They are excellent & so precise, with not a single part of what u need 2 know 2 paint professionally missed out. Their aftercare is amazing too. Just b prepared not to rush the process & practice, practice! Good luck!
We ARE back - over here: glasspaintersmethod.substack.com Come and join us: new demonstrations, lessons and videos every two weeks! glasspaintersmethod.substack.com
Thank you, that's kind of you to say. If you're interested, we'll soon be starting to post videos, podcasts and lessons on Substack - right now (mid-March 2023), we're just finishing the migration. Here's where: glasspaintersmethod.substack.com/about
Good afternoon dear Sir. I' m from Uruguay . I have just found you. I ' m very pleased at lookig at you doing this but I couldn' t understand this : as a base on the glass , did you put the mix of your own paint you've prepeared before ?
Hello! At about 5 minutes 50 seconds, we use glass paint to apply a very light coat of paint: we call this the "undercoat". When the undercoat is dry, and provided there is enough gum arabic in the paint, then we trace and flood etc. on top of it (this is from about 6 minutes 20 seconds). It's the same paint - the undercoat, the tracing, the flooding etc. - but different consistencies. Does that answer your question?
Thank you so much for making these videos. Can I ask... I think you’re painting wet paint over the previously dried paint. Why doesn’t the second layer interfere with the first? I would’ve expected it to reawaken the first layer and drag it around. 🤔 Love your dog at the end! 💕
Yes, there are various layers. First of all, this is all done using paint mixed with water and gum Arabic. And so, provided there's a good amount of gum Arabic in your paint, then, if you're careful, you can for instance trace on top of the unfired undercoat, or flood and strengthen on top of / against unfired trace lines. You just need to wait long enough for the previous layers to dry before moving onto the next technique. So the answer to your question is: because of the gum Arabic. However, even with (water and) gum Arabic, there are limits to what you can do if you only want to fire once: at some point, the risk of damaging the earlier layers begins to become too high. There are other media - e.g. gold size - which allow for many, many risk-free layers, and firing just once, at the end. If you're interested, there's an overview on our blog here www.glasspaintersmethod.com/shading/ where we use gold size to paint layer upon layer, then fire just once.
@Dog Portraits UK Thanks. It's our pleasure. On the blog, we'll soon be starting a new video series. It'll include videos about water and gum Arabic, and also gold size. I hope you'll join us.
Hi Stephen- Could you please recommend a good brush for the tracing stage? I am not sure what to get. Thank you so much for a great video. I always enjoy them.
Gladly. Here are the brushes (and tools and paints) we use when we paint with water and gum arabic. If you scroll down, you'll find the section on the (kind of) tracing brush we recommend:: www.courses.glasspaintersmethod.com/stained-glass-painting-brushes-paints-tools/
@@stephenbyrne7169 I don't see it mentioned, which kind of brush were you using for the larger areas of flooding? Was it on of the pointed synthetic applicators like you recommend for silverstain and the gycol shadows?
@@youngyvidz716 Well spotted: I should have mentioned it. Now this brush is excellent but it isn't a "must-have". It's just that, when you have a lot of flooding to do - I do mean: a lot - then it can be worth the money to buy this brush and worth the time to learn to paint with it. But this brush will only work for someone if he or she already knows how to flood - the consistency of paint, how to test it, how to keep it in peak condition, how to load the brush, how to carry the paint to your glass, how to deposit it and how to spread it. In other words, as with all brushes of course: this brush is not a piece of magic. What it is, is: a time-saver, when you have a lot of flooding to do, and you already know how to flood. The brush is the Da Vinci series 5519. There's a blog post here on it: www.glasspaintersmethod.com/da-vinci-series-5519/ .
If your unfired painted glass is protected from dust and damp, my experience is: many months. This is with glass paint mixed with water and shop-bought gum arabic (which might have additives that inhibit mould). Approaching the question from a different direction: when I started out, I didn't own a kiln till 24 months later, and I could only occasionally fire my painted glass in someone else's kiln, on the other side of town, and I often kept my painted glass for many months, even if I never got to fire it, and it served a purpose, because I could compare it with what I painted later: even unfired, this was useful - you can, for instance, see how smooth your flooding is. It's a bit like keeping a diary which you never publish ("fire"): when you do this, you give yourself the chance to see how you write better than you did 6 months ago.
Hi Stephen, thankyou for sharing your expertise, I hope all is going well in your world, I was wondering, is all the layers done with Reusch tracing paint? ie… the matting is purely watered down tracing paint? TIA 😊
Hi, Kim - whilst we usually use Reusche tracing paint, in this video we used paint by Rüger & Günzel. (We wanted to make sure we weren't becoming stuck in our ways.) The same lump of paint throughout: prepared with water and liquid gum Arabic.
Hello I purchased your book. Am a little worried about the availability of Reusche paints in US. And more importantly the health aspects of working with Reusche paints. They can cause cancer? They contain lead? How do you work with them and stay healthy?
No problem with availability: Reusche / Schilling is a US company. Health: there are lead- and cadmium-free versions. Also, the way we mix paint - with a lump, which you keep moist - there's very little dust. David and I have never had problems with health: it seems to us to be simply a matter of being sensible - keep food and drink away, wash hands when finished. And (again) mixing paint the way we do, to minimise dust.
Yes, we teach courses. The best place to start is our blog with many videos we don't publish to RU-vid. Our blog is here www.glasspaintersmethod.com/blog
You guys are super super guarded regarding your knowledge of stain glass in general, I would NEVER pay a penny for any of your material, your entire strategy is to give only a snippet of information of the subject matter then lure people in to pay for any basic info. You expect people to pay for a course then yet again you only provide the basic info with a view to lure them in again to pay more for any additional information…I have found a profoundly better stained glass artist (I wouldn’t even call you guys artists) namely Derek Hunt, who is an absolute gem and extremely gifted, if you don’t know of him he is on RU-vid with loads of info and videos that showcases his many talents, I suggest you go and watch him since you will learn loads and hopefully improve your material !
We have waited a day to see if you, Mark, having slept and reflected on your comment, edited or decided to withdraw it. It is now time for us to provide you with our reply. To be clear about two points. First, we are fine with criticism; it simply needs to be well-founded. Second, well-founded criticism isn’t especially hard; there are many videos we wish we’d narrated or filmed differently. Now to your several points. “I would NEVER pay a penny for any of your material”: that’s your choice, but we suggest you therefore cannot know the quality of our paid-for material. “You guys are super super guarded regarding your knowledge of stain glass”: of the 85 videos we published last year, 71 were free and 14 were behind a paywall. We suggest this won’t seem “guarded” to most people. “Your entire strategy is to give only a snippet of information of the subject matter then lure people in to pay for any basic info”: what are you talking about? Last year we emailed our subscribers with a free 1,500-word lesson every fortnight, with regular free designs and free step-by-step downloads: we suggest this is not most people’s idea of a “snippet”. We also suggest you are not in any position to know all or even a small part of our strategy. “You expect people to pay for a course then yet again you only provide the basic info with a view to lure them in again to pay more for any additional information”: it’s true there are four courses (for four distinct topics). Students are free to pick and choose. This is not what most people would understood as “being lured”. Besides, it’s perfectly clear from the outset there are four courses: if something’s clear (the way that our four courses are), it’s not “luring” in the accepted sense. The elephant in the room, however, is that you say you haven’t taken a course with us, from which it follows you cannot reliably comment on the completeness or the quality of information we provide inside our courses. “I have found a profoundly better stained glass artist … namely Derek Hunt”: indeed, Derek Hunt is amazingly talented. Over the years, we’ve given his name to several of our would-be clients, because we recognised that he’d be better for their work than we could be. “I wouldn’t even call you guys artists”: we don’t know what you’ve accomplished in your own life to settle if your opinion counts for anything at all or not, but we don’t wish you to imagine that we call ourselves artists. We consider ourselves to be jobbing stained glass painters - very good at some things (traditional and emblematic stained glass painting, for instance), not so good at others (such as realistic faces), and very honest. Online, since 2009 when we first started posting free articles and videos on the internet, we’ve sought to demonstrate how we daily worked inside our studio: for instance, the kinds of brushes and techniques we regularly use. This is not an “artistic” endeavour; it's a collaborative one. “I suggest you go and watch him since you will learn loads and hopefully improve your material”: it’s not appropriate for you, who has never met us and whose accomplishments and standing we are anyway unfamiliar with, to suggest how we might spend our time on earth. Each year we give free access to any of our courses to many people who write and say they want learn but who, having demonstrated their commitment, say they can’t afford to pay: if such criteria also apply to you, by all means send us an email, and we’ll consider your case. But please don’t imagine free courses are a magic bullet. One of us had a four-year apprenticeship, the other had an eight-year apprenticeship. To anyone who hasn’t undergone such a protracted and often painful process, it can easily appear that a teacher is showing off on the one hand or keeping secrets on the other. This is because learning is long and difficult, even with the best teachers in the world (which we’ve never claimed to be). The small-minded - whether this is you or not, we would not presume to say - too frequently imagine the reason that they fail is that someone is deceiving or short-changing them. Actually, they haven’t put in the several thousand hours of practice and self-reflection. When someone builds a lovely public park and garden, then makes a charge for entrance to certain areas to help cover the on-going maintenance costs, there’ll always be a few members of the public who enter the main area and puke or urinate and generally defile their beautiful surroundings. But we clean up - this is because the mess these vandals cause might otherwise deter good people from enjoying what’s been provided for them - and carry on. You imply that we are scammers: Mark Shaw, we suggest that you can know nothing of our values and of the integrity with which we lead our daily lives. To conclude: Derek Hunt is a wonderful stained glass painter. You are right about that. People should certainly watch his videos and learn as much as they can.
