We’re going to be making some stained glass windows. Stained glass windows are probably best known during the Middle Ages when there were a lot of churches being built. The idea of the stained glass window was to allow the light to come thorough the windows and to project all this beautiful colored light coming from the colored glass into the church. And it was kind of the idea of letting the light of God shine into the church to inspire the people. They have some really neat materials that can help you get this effect and if you go to your local art store you can find a product called scratch light. And it’s actually a colored piece of—like a film that has colors already on it and it’s covered with a coating of black ink that you actually scratch away to reveal the different colors underneath. And then you leave the black showing which is supposed to look like the leading that would be use to hold the pieces of glass together on your stained glass.
So we’re going to go ahead and get started. What you’ll need is a piece of paper, sketch paper that’s on the same as your scratch light paper. And this scratch light, a little kit actually comes with. It’s got several sheets of the film and it’s the dull side is the side that you will actually scratch on. It comes with a little scratch tool and it also comes with its own white transfer paper which allows you to take your sketch and transfer it on to the black. So we’re going to go ahead and I actually have a sketch that I did. I went on the internet and I found a picture of some lilies and I sketch them on my paper. And what I’m going to do next is to make it really look like a traditional stained glass window; we’re going to have to put some panels in the back of it so that it looks like all this pieces are joined to the edge of the window.
The characteristic of stained glass is that you have all these different pieces of colored glass that are all joined together by this leading. And in order for the image to be part of the outside of the edge of the window, there also has to be glass and leading joining it to the edge of the window. So what we’re going to do is come in here and I’m going to add some extra lines here. Now, the next step is to go ahead and go over all your lines and you’ll notice that on my drawing I’ve put a little border here. And the best thing to do so you don’t get confuse is to just lightly color in everything. And then, what I do is I come in here and I’m going to thicken up all of—these are my leading lines. And then everything in between is the colored glass and that’s going to be the part that you’re going to scratch away to reveal.
So first thing, we thicken up all these lines and this will make it easier when you’re going to transfer this. Now, what you’re going to do is you’re going to thicken up all of the lines of the drawing. Now, during the middle ages, they actually make two different kinds of colored glass for the windows in churches. There were stained glass and then there was they called pot glass. And the pot glass, they actually painted on the glass with black a lot of the details and then that paint were--is fired into the pieces of glass and then the pieces of glass were put together. The stained glass is actually pieces of glass that have been joined together by the leading. So there’s the difference between pot glass and stained glass. And also during the Middle Ages the subject matter most of the stained glass since they were predominantly in the churches was all religious. And most of the art created during the Middle Ages probably 98% of it was also religious because most of the people couldn’t read; only people who could read would be really wealthy people or the clergy. And the art was away to teach the people about Christianity. During the middle ages, the most of the arts that you’ll see in Museums and learned about is all religious art.
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