Glass Moon - a painted suncatcher

Just last night I finished a new suncatcher. I make lot of suncatchers, usually from wire and beads, but this one was quite different. It involved painted glass, which is a technique I haven't used for quite a while. I used to do it all the time. This time though, I've not done it in the usual way. How you're supposed to do it is put the outliner on the glass then, after it has dried, put the paint in between where the outliner is, to look like stained glass with lead. I instead just painted onto the glass straight away, painting over the outliner in places and using it on top of the paint in others, to give it extra texture and colour.

I started off with a rectangle of glass, which was originally in this frame. I don't like to waste anything! I painted this glass with blue glass paint:



then painted a moon onto that with white glass paint:



After I'd let that dry, I then wrapped steel wire around the edges of the glass to form a frame, and also something from which to hang this piece:



I then painted a tree onto the glass, painting over some of the wire. This wire forms a frame for this painting and also gives more texture to the tree. I also painted silver-coloured outliner on top of the tree to echo the colour of the steel wire, and add to the texture. This suncatcher measures 17cm (6.5") wide by 13cm (5") high.



It's for sale here.

The Escape

For the past few days, I've been working on a painting called "The Escape", so called because it depicts a tree escaping from its frame. I'd bought a second-hand frame I bought from a charity shop, and took a while deciding what to do with it. I remembered an idea I'd had for continuing a painting onto its frame, so I made a start:

First I sanded the varnish off the frame:



Then added some woodstain:



After adding a thin coat of blue woodstain, I painted some branches onto the green, using glass outliner:



After painting the piece to go inside this frame:



I then added a trunk onto the green, using glass outliner, and painted a coppery brown within the outliner:



After that I felt that it perhaps needed more blue, to balance out the inside, so I tried a couple of things:



In the end, however, I decided not to add birds or butterflies.

To finish the piece I wrapped some copper wire around the frame to hang it from. The curves and colours of the copper I feel compliment the glass outliner on the frame:



This piece is for sale here on DaWanda.

New Year, New Art

So what have I been up to since I last blogged? Working very hard for Acme Jewellery, mostly. But all work and no play makes Jen a dull girl, so I've had a few decent nights out too, including seeing Madness on the 12th Dec and Aladdin (a panto starring John Barrowman) on 20th Dec. Yayness! With them, plus Bill Bailey and Alice Cooper, I've had a busy winter :D

I started a new project in the Christmas holidays too. The actual paintings have nothing to do with this, but me starting to paint again was inspired by reading Anthony Keidis's autobiography. He described how he and the rest of the Chilis lived in a house while writing Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and that John would be painting in his room there. Just the word 'painting' made me want to paint stuff, so the next day I started off a new sketchbook of paintings, little ideas for future canvases.

The first page of the sketchbook is a version of this canvas (click the image for a little more about this piece):



Using that canvas as inspiration, I painted a similar scene in watercolours and acrylics:



I traced the outline of the tree onto a piece of acetate with a marker, then added to this using copper-coloured glass outliner. I cut a hole in the top of the plastic, then attached it to the rings of my sketchbook with black ribbon.







The next page. Painted in watercolours:



When I was in college, a few years ago, one of the things the tutors had us doing was drawing the negative space around a figure, rather than the figure itself. I've come back to this idea, painting the sky around the tree rather than the tree itself.

I'll have more of these soon, plus some canvases and Valentines cards based on them.