I decided to make a stained glass panel for my grand daughter’s first birthday with the ulterior motive of making sure she learns about colour. It’s not really a colour wheel as there are no curves. I designed it with the pieces of coloured glass all the same size and shape so I could move them around post cutting. There are also slivers of clear glass to separate out the rings of colour, with the most intense colours on the inside ring.
Left, design for the panel, working out the tessellation. Right, glass pieces cut & shown against a white wall.
From my boxes of coloured glass scraps, I chose the lightest colours and the thinnest glass. Many of the pieces are flashed glass, only one is an enamelled colour and all of the clear glass scraps and border are textured. Once I had put them on a backing sheet with plasticine blobs, it was fascinating to see how the colours change according to their background.
Left, pieces shown against a garden background. Right, pieces shown against a sky background.
Left, leading completed. Right, graph paper cartoon after leading.
As the pieces are small (60mm across the hexagons, 10mm width of slivers) the leading was fiddly. The most fascinating photo (below right) is the one of the colours projected by the sun on to the floor, I’ve rotated and flipped it so you can compare colours across the photos. You can see that at this angle the shadows of the lead obscure the clear slivers and also the purpose of textured glass as it sends the light out in all different directions. The enamelled piece is the pale lemon one, the most perfectly clear.
Left, completed panel against tracing paper. Right, paper removed and the sun came out.