Lesson 6: Painting on Glass -Supplies

Applicators and other Equipment

The applicator you choose to use for your project depends on the look you are after. In some styles of painting, the brush strokes are meant to be visible. To many, being able to see that lines left by a paintbrush are the mark of hand painting. People may place a higher value on a piece because of this. But not everything that we paint looks good with brush strokes in it, so there are several alternatives to consider.

Brushes - The best are brushes that will hold a lot of paint. Unlike most types of stenciling, with glass you want the paint to flow on. That means we have to get rid of our accustomed dry brush painting and learn to work with a fairly wet brush.

Natural bristled, soft brushes work best for this, and leave the fewest obvious strokes. Synthetic brushes will also work, but leave a more obvious stroke mark. The best of all possible brushes combines both synthetic and natural bristles. Loew-Cornell's Mixtique line is highly recommended if you want the least evidence of your brush strokes. But some painters excel at using the stroke of the brush to create detail and shadowing - in which case they may prefer a synthetic.

You will want several types of brushes - very small ones for outlining, adding fine details and working in small areas, and wider ones for larger areas.

• A couple of brushes with angled tips can be very useful when you are trying to create shadows and highlights. These brushes are meant to be double loaded or side loaded to create shadows and highlights in a single stroke, which we will explain later.
• A lining brush is great for drawing in lines such as stems and leaf veins, flower stamens and more.
• A filbert shaped brush is good for painting in leaves.
• Brushes with rounded tips are great for flower petals and other objects that have rounded shapes.
• Those fan shaped brushes are perfect when you want texture, such as when painting ainmals with fur, birds with feathers, etc.
• You can also use a traditional stencil brush if you want a stippled effect. This is especially desirable when you want a frosted look, or when you want to create the illusion of even texture with your paint.

Even if you are using a stencil, you'll find that because of the special characteristics of glass paint you may find these artist brushes easier to work with.

Sponges - Sometimes a sponge, or sponge tipped brush will work better for you - especially when you want to cover a fairly large area with even color.

Crafts stores sell sponge tipped brushes called Spouncers which are excellent for applying glass paint and getting a slightly stippled but relatively even effect. These brushes have a flat end, much as a stencil brush does, and so paint goes on fairly quickly. The circular end also works well to pounce on circle shapes, such as the center of a flower.

But for larger areas you may want to look into cosmetic sponges, which come in everything from dense foam wedges that leave a smooth surface on the paint, to the small brushes used to apply eye makeup, which are excellent for working in tight spaces.

Sponges like these, with very dense foam, do not leave brush marks. They may be the applicator of choice when you want a smooth effect.

Color Shapers - These are intended to be "paint erasers" - a way to remove paint in order to show details or create patterns. They are made of a material that will not absorb paint, and will wipe clean of even solvent based paints with plain water. And they are actually as good at putting paint on - completely evenly, without a trace of strokes – as they are at removing it. You definitely need to "stroke" with these, however. The familiar stipple and swirl of the stencil brush simply will not work

Squeeze bottles with open tips - Some paints, like Tri Chem, are already bottled this way, with an applicator tip through which you are supposed to flow the paint into an area that has been dammed with a raised outliner paint, or with peelable paint. Since these paints are very thin, unless they are flowed on this way you get a very pale color and need several applications of paint (with sufficient drying time in between) to get any very intense color effects. The tips of these tubes are also used to drag between to contrasting colors as a method of blending them.

Glass paints for outlining also come in either a squeeze bottle or tube with a small opening in the tip, through which the paint is extruded onto the glass surface. However, you can take any paint and put it into a small squeeze bottle to apply this way. Some paints may need to be diluted if you are using this bottle to flow them on. Check your paint - some can be diluted with plain water, whereas others work best with a special medium for dilution.

If you are using the tip to create outlines, then you won't need to dilute, and in fact may want to see if your brand has an available thickening medium so that you get that slightly raised effect.

Fingers - Yes - believe it or not, a finger can be a paint tool, and is often used when you want to create a textured and roughly circular effect on the glass. These can be random "dots" in a design, or the roughly circular centers of many flowers. Just be careful to wash your hands thoroughly when done so as not to leave unwanted smears on the glass.

Brush handles
When a design calls for small dots of color - as the tiny white pupil of a bird's eye - the easiest way to do it is by dipping the hard end of a small paintbrush into the paint and lightly touching it to the area where the color is needed. Practice this a bit, because you can sometimes get a succession of sizes, from large to small, by tapping the paint-coated handle onto the glass several times. If you want only a very small dot you may want to tap the handle on your palette a couple of times first.

Palettes
Since shading on glass is different from shading on other surfaces, it is wise to have some type of hard surfaced palette handy. You will use this to mix colors, to dilute colors to get a paler shade, and to load the brush with colors and dilutants for special effects, which we will discuss in the next lesson. You can buy a real palette, with small depressions to hold the different colors, in any crafts store, but you can also get away with using any coated paper plate.

Miscellaneous
I also find it handy to keep a sheet or two of paper toweling around, since sometimes shading calls for a "dirty" brush - but not one wet with another completely different color. So you may need to wipe some paint out of the brush to get the correct effect.

Keep a small jar of water handy, as well. Especially if paints can be diluted with water to create paler shades, you will find yourself using it often. But it is handy when you make a mistake - a quick application of water with your paper towel or a small makeup sponge will erase it while the paint is still wet.

If the area you want to correct is small, then cotton swabs or clean small foam brushes can be used to clean up small mistakes. You can also get a paint eraser - similar to a color shaper, but made specifically to remove fine portions of paint. This is not only great for correcting errors, but can be used to create purposeful clear areas in newly painted areas of glass - small hearts, maybe a name - whatever your imagination can conjure.

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