Glass is a very familiar and ordinary material that is so familiar in everyday life that its fragility, transparency, amazing smoothness, which forms light flares on the surface, ceased to impress and surprise. However, glass is still widely used in arts and crafts. Artists, using its amazing properties, create wonderful works of art that adorn our life and each time make us take a completely new look at this familiar and always such new material.
One of the brightest directions in art since ancient times is glass painting. Moreover, some artists use transparent paints for painting, creating an imitation of stained glass, while others create a dense background painting on glass with acrylic paint with gentle transitions of shades and halftones. Glass painting is one of the simple and easily accessible forms of art that anyone can do for their own expression and decoration of their life.
You can decorate a lot of different objects with paintings: wine glasses, vases, shades on floor lamps and chandeliers, decorative plates, panels and bottles. You can dare and create larger forms, for example, decorate with painted glass in the interior doors or cabinet doors, make a painted glass screen, etc. Do-it-yourself glass painting opens up great opportunities for creativity.
Glass painting with acrylic paints
To master painting on glass with your own hands using acrylic paints you need to have: acrylic contour paste of 2-3 colors, glossy acrylic varnish, a thin brush (No. 1-2) and, of course, acrylic paints for glass and ceramics, as well as a glass item , which we will paint, and a convenient flat container for mixing paints.
Before you start, you need to decide on the picture. You can create a sketch yourself, if there are no special drawing abilities, find a suitable pattern in books, magazines, etc. To begin with, it is better to dwell on a simple small fragment. We redraw it on tracing paper along the contour, preserving everything, even very small details. We put it under the glass surface and outline all the lines of the drawing with an acrylic contour. Glass must always be degreased before work. By the way, painting on glass with your own hands using acrylic paints allows you to do without a base picture or a stencil. You can take a contour paste and apply it on a glass surface in any order, creating an abstract mesh pattern. It is important that the cells of this grid are large enough so that they can then be filled with paint.
The acrylic contour is quite thick and dense, creating a convex wire effect after drying, it does not allow the paint to flow into neighboring cells. All fragments of the picture between the contour are filled with paint of various colors and shades. Before working with paint, the circuit must be allowed to dry.
Acrylic paints are not transparent, they lay a dense matte layer of bright saturated color. By mixing colors, you can achieve various effects and get the necessary shades, and by adding gold or silver colors, you can get the effects of overflows and viscous gold and silver threads. You can draw two, three paints of different colors on the brush at once and apply to the glass surface without mixing, you get a special effect. In a word, a wide field for artistic experiments opens here. Try it, mix paints, get the most unexpected effects.
Another technique for painting with acrylic paints is based on a combination of inhomogeneous density layers of paint filling adjacent cells. We will fill one with a denser paint assembled from three colors, and the other with paint of one color diluted with acrylic varnish, which will give it a light transparency and subtlety. And if you mix paint with varnish in a ratio of 1: 1, then the paint will become completely transparent, and the cells coated with it will be almost “stained”.
Finally, the last stage of work. So that the painted object can be washed, and the paints better “adhered” to the surface of the glass, after careful drying it is placed in an oven heated to 120-150 degrees (no more), and kept there for 20-30 minutes. Then leave in the oven until it cools completely. Glass painting
ready.
Painting glass bottles with acrylics according to the described technology can become a very interesting, exciting occupation. Bottles of various shapes and sizes can be a worthy basis for artistic creation and the creation of genuine “masterpieces”. Do-it-yourself glass painting is a wonderful hobby for children to join.