Stained Glass Lettering

Several of you have written to ask about painting black letters onto stained glass, and how to do this really accurately …

It’s certainly possible to use a computer-generated stencil (and flood the glass paint, for example; or apply a thick wash, and blend it).

However, it’s certainly also possible to do it by hand. Here, for example, you see some damage to the lettering of a stained glass window in a chapel:

Damaged lettering in a stained glass window

In this instance, we were asked to paint a copy (rather than to use glue to edge-bond the broken fragments). So we removed the glass and took it to our studio.

We set down the lettering with calligraphic precision. We painted an undercoat. We copy-traced the design:

Copy-trace the design with great care

At this point we used a stick to correct tiny inaccuracies. Then we reinforced the lines as you see we’ve started doing here:

Reinforce the copy-traced lines

Once again, we used a stick to correct any minor inaccuracies.

Then it was time to fill in the lettering. The paint was thicker and darker than the paint we’d used to copy-trace and reinforce, but, working on such a small scale, it was by no means as thick as the kind of paint we’d use for silhouettes (because, with that degree of thickness, we wouldn’t have had the control that we required).

Once the paint had dried, we picked around it once again:

Use a stick to clean up around the edges of your lettering

Once fired, we returned the new lettering to its rightful place:

And last of all install your forgery

The whole process calls for patience, good eye-sight, concentration, a good understanding of how glass paint behaves, and excellent hand-eye co-ordination.

And time.