Talk:Glass painting

To paint glass beautifully, you have to grapple with a pair of ﬁendish problems. First of all, glass paint behaves in such peculiar and demanding ways. For example, it is forever drying on the palette, and you must, therefore, be forever remixing it. Secondly, glass is such a shiny surface to paint that the brush has nothing to grip, and paint can run all over the place. Therefore, tracing a design accurately is certainly a demanding task. Now, this isn’t always a bad thing. When you’re required to focus closely on what you’re doing (and nothing else), it’s often far more pleasurable than when there are 152 other things buzzing around your head. That’s one of the joys of stained glass painting—the peace of absolute concentration. To make tracing as easy—and tranquil—as it can be, however, we have so far given you two important proposals to make your tracing less stressful. First, before you start, prepare a good size lump of glass paint (not a teaspoonful). When you work with a lump, you can dilute it a little at a time to obtain the consistency you need for the next few brushstrokes. You can then trace in the conﬁdent knowledge that your paint is as it should be—even an artistic genius needs well-mixed paint. Second, before you trace, it is often sensible to prime the surface of the glass with a light-colored undercoat of glass paint. This means that you cover the shiny, slippery surface with a matte ﬁnish. Therefore your brush now has something it can adhere to, which makes it easier to trace beautifully.