Design Sources

Principles of design practice for stained glass, 4

Use the everyday visual experience and make interpretations and adaptations. E.g.,

• draw lead lines on an illustration to make it suitable for stained glass, using the fewest lines possible
• Use your photographs of interesting subjects and scenes

These may never become useable designs or cartoons, but will increase you abilities to design from the real world toward the abstract.

Make and keep sketches as personal references. These do not need to be finished drawings, just a reminder of the thing(s) that caught your eye. Many artists always carry around a notebook to record these observations. Even if you only make drawings on paper napkins, make a folder to keep these separate sketches together.

Take photos of shapes and interesting images. These can then be used later to develop images.

Make up composite images by using overlays or collage. This helps develop your compositional abilities.

Work on abstraction in your design practice:

• Study abstract representations. Dissect – decomposition is a popular word - and analyse how the work is put together.
• Use geometric design as an introduction to abstract design. This forces your attention to structure, balance and colour.
• Once the distribution of the physical and visual weights is understood, this enables the jump to more free forms of abstraction.

Elements of Design:

Designing for strength 

Colour selection

Design lines 

Design sources 

Reworking designs 

Beautiful Design Lines

Principles of design practice for stained glass, 3

Stained glass is a graphic medium where line and colour are very important. Achieving pleasing lines and forms requires practice and use of various approaches and techniques.

The two dimensional world is one of abstract thought. Work and development are the way to creativity – there is no mystical talent. Practice drawing every day – set aside time to do it, if you normally shy away from drawing as an exercise.

Study and learn from what has gone before. Look at the images and objects you admire and analyse what you like about them and why. Also consider what things could have been done differently. Consider how those changes would affect the character of the piece.

Of course, maintaining your creative attention is difficult, so when blocks occur try some or all of these things:

• Put the work aside for a day or two before taking it out and looking at it again.
• Alternatively, pin up the design on a wall where you can look at as you pass by. When you see a change to be made, do it immediately and pin it back up.
• Get a new perspective, e.g.:
  • Turn it upside down. This will enable you to observe differences and spot inconsistencies
  • Look at it in a mirror. You might see people studying still life or live subjects together with their drawing in a hand mirror to get a new perspective that will help spot difficulties.
  • Put the design on the floor and climb a ladder to look at it. This provides distance and changes the angle at which you look at your design.

Remember that design tends toward realism or abstraction. You need to work on both forms, remembering that glass is a graphic medium that tends toward abstraction. Working on both forms develops your flexibility and knowledge. Having a working knowledge of both enables you to have a responsive approach to the client.

Elements of Design:

Designing for strength 

Colour selection

Design lines 

Design sources 

Reworking designs 

Responsive Colour Selection

Principles of design practice for stained glass, 2

The graphic form of much stained glass means that the medium is about line and colour. This requires that you think about both your and the viewer's response to the colour combinations. Respond to your instincts. Use you feelings about colour and their relationships. Try different colour ways. Formal training does help, but experience develops your skills. The individuality of the piece depends on the use of your instincts about the colour. There are some checks you can make while selecting colours.

Think of colour and impact. Hot colours tend to have more impact, as they give bright points or areas. Impact can also be created by using non-complementary colours together. If a more subtle impression is desired, use tonal variations without great contrasts.

Vary areas of colour and their proportions. This provides interest to a panel. It avoids a mechanical symmetrical appearance, even if the design is symmetrical

Think about colour balance. Although the colours may vary it is important that the weights of the colours are balanced so that the focus of the panel is not taken to another part because of the imbalance of the colour with the design.

When you are in difficulty selecting or arranging the colour, step back and view from a distance. This is one of several techniques to enable you to get a larger or different view. Others include viewing the design through a mirror, viewing through half closed eyes, look at the design from the other end, and viewing the design from acute angles.

When something feels wrong, trust your intuition and use other colours. Colour theory is just that -theory. It is through using your reactions that the piece becomes individual.

Seek out the nuances of the glass in tones and textures. These alter the perceived colour and weight considerably.

Keep the design lines simple when your emphasis is on colour, light and texture. This allows those qualities to dominate the panel, rather than the lines.

Always make a coloured drawing, before choosing the glass, as a reference. This is a rendering of your original idea. It provides a reference as you select the colours. It is something that can be altered, of course, but does provide an essential reference point.

Choose glass colours in the kind of light for which the panel is intended. This is essential, as the glass colour is subtly different in daylight, incandescent, and fluorescent lights.

Elements of Design:

Designing for strength 

Colour selection

Design lines 

Design sources 

Reworking designs 

Designing for Strength

Principles of Design Practice for Stained Glass, 1

There comes a stage when each of us moves from using patterns developed by others to trying to realise our own vision. This is the time where in attempting to reproduce an image from our mind or from natural and man-made forms that we begin to encounter difficulties with the medium of glass and lead or copper foil.

There are a number of principles that should be kept in mind while designing, or at least referred to when the design is reaching its final stages. This series of notes is an attempt to outline a number of the most important points in designing glass panels, especially larger ones.

Structural strength

The panel needs to be strong to last for a long time. Glass is a very resilient material; so is lead and solder. It would be a shame to design a panel in long-lasting materials that will not last because of the design and construction. There are some things to remember about creating a strong panel.

The strength of a panel is in its glass.

Glass in compression is stronger than steel. It is only when it is in tension that its weakness - or fragility – becomes apparent. So the structural arrangement of the glass needs to be such that each piece of glass supports its neighbours. It also needs to use shapes that are strong.

Avoid the following shapes:

• Hour glass shapes – those where the ends are wider/larger than the middle - will crack at the narrowest part. If the shape – usually a negative or background one – is necessary, break it up into smaller pieces that make sense in the whole design. It is also possible to add details that will break up these shapes, but be careful that the details do not detract from the whole.
• Exaggerated, deep inner curves will crack at apex of curve. If unavoidable, you should consider adding design lines where the glass would break anyway, or moving elements closer together so they almost touch to avoid the single deep inner curve.
• Thin long and tapering glass pieces will crack at the point or be covered by the lead or copper foil. Where you need to have such shapes, try drawing the lead or copper foil lines on the design. You can do this on a piece of tracing paper to avoid messing up your original design. This will show you how the finished panel may look. Alternatively, you can divide the long tapering piece of glass into several pieces so that any flexibility of the whole panel does not break the long thin piece. Short thin pieces are not so likely to be broken by any movement of the panel.

Lines radiating from a single point provide weak areas. This is due to long thin pieces of glass being liable to breakage. Break up long thin pieces of glass with lines. This ensures that the length of the glass is in a strong relationship with its narrowness.

Avoid “hinges” - lines that run from edge to edge – as that provides an area where the panel can bend. This is why windows made up of rectangular quarries need so much support and even then over time begin to concertina.

Don’t over complicate the cut lines. This makes for difficulty in cutting the pieces. Also the more difficult it is to cut the pieces of glass, the more likely it is to fail by breaking after being installed.

Elements of Design:

Designing for strength 

Colour selection

Design lines 

Design sources 

Reworking designs 

Re-Firing Holes

Occasionally you need to re-fire a piece that already has holes drilled into it. The smaller holes tend to close up or reduce in diameter when they are larger. There is a method to resist this and still have a neat smooth hole.

To keep the holes open during a re-firing, cut a strip of Thinfire a little thinner than the thickness of the glass to be fired, roll it up tightly and put it into the hole to be kept open. Starting the wrapping around a pencil or pen makes the start easy and the roll can be tightened by holding the centre and pulling the end.

Put the roll into the hole and allow it to expand to fill the hole. It does not have to be solid. If the roll is as high or higher than the surrounding glass there is a tendency to get spikes.

This works fine on 6mm and thicker glass, but I have never tried it on 3mm glass. No reason why it shouldn't work though in my estimation if you can cut and manipulate 2mm strips of fibre paper.

Slumping cracks

Cracks on the bottom of slumped bowls initially appear mysterious if not impossible.

It seems that what is happening is that the crack results from too fast a heat up.

The top gets plastic during a - relatively speaking - too quick a rise in temperature, while the bottom is still too cold to move. The piece splits on the bottom to relieve the stress of the weight of the upper portion of the glass. It does not break completely through, because the top is hot enough to move rather than break.

This bowl split as it was much thicker than I thought.  The firing was too fast and the top began to slump before the bottom was warm enough to move.  This is an extreme version of the split described above.

You need to put much more heat into the piece in the 50C above the annealing temperature if you experience this splitting effect. This can be done by a soak in the region of 540C-600C for Bullseye, or by a very slow rise in this region. The heating above this also needs to be slow to ensure the glass at the bottom of the piece is nearly the same as the top.

You will find that as a result of these slow rises or long low temperature soaks that the slump will occur at a lower temperature than with a rapid rise. This will also have the additional benefit of leaving fewer mould marks on the bottom of the piece.