Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Glass Painting Madness Part the First

Years ago, one Xmas, I fooled around with that fake stained glass paint and liquid leading - I think I was trying to make stained glass fairy light covers using clear plastic balls and they proved to be difficult/impossible and the whole project got chucked in a box and ignored. When we moved house I rediscovered the box (and the dried up glass paints) and was Inspired. Dear gods, not again...

Well, the house now boasts a selection of art naif-style, brightly coloured decorations on all sorts of surfaces. I started with the bathrooom mirror. As the house had been a rental for the last quarter of a century, the fitting were, well, somewhere between basic and crumbling. There was a shitty little (read 20cm square) mirror pinned to the bathroom wall which absolutely had to go! In its place I hung a larger one I'd got at a second-hand shop which, unfortunately, had no frame to affix hangy things to so I tied a couple of pieces of sturdy wire around its ends and hung it from those. This, as you can imagine, looked pretty fugly; so it got the 'stained glass' treatment.

The next project was very small - I found an 'oyster' light cover in the garage (in amongst a huge amount of junk which I evidently bought with the house itself) and figured that if it were prettier, I could use it (most of the lights were missing shades). At this stage, I still had only half a dozen different colours...

Then came the shower screen (a sliding glass one) and the new
knowledge (acquired from my sister-in-law) that one could paint designs on a special plastic sheet and then peel them off and stick them onto the glass surface (having given it a bloody good clean!). This opened up a whole lot of options (for one, it meant that I didn't have to take down the shower screen for 48 hours and paint it horizontally and hope no one got water all over the bathroom floor when showering...) and the shower recess became an aquarium. I guess it didn't help that a year or so later I continued with the 'fish' theme on the bathroom ceiling by covering it with an old hammock that looked fairly much like a fishnet and from that suspending small resin fish, plastic aquarium plants, and shells.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Inspiring stuff mim! very nice effect it produces too