Stained glass: Session 2

The second session began with a checking through of the cartoon I had made during the week. 

Stained glass cartoon: Sharpie on paper just over A1 size

This was seen as OK, just a slight adjustment was needed near the top edge where the leg meets the border, it required a little straightening to ensure the line met the border more at right angles. The next job was to trace this with a Sharpie, onto another sheet of white cartridge paper, cut from a roll, (approx. 90 gsm) and using a large lightbox in order to see the cartoon below. All the areas of both drawings that corresponded to pieces of glass that would have to be cut, were then numbered, so that it was easy to see where each piece was to go, by having one uncut template to always refer to. The set of shapes that are being cut out are made to draw around and by having a number on one side you always know which way up the paper needs to be. Everything has a purpose. I began to realise why the paper for the cartoon needed to be the weight it is. Too thick and you cant trace through it on the light-box; too thin and it becomes impossible to trace around. The Sharpie creates a very clear line, it is therefore easy to trace. However it is also its ability to be used to draw smooth curves that makes it a vital tool, it can ride over the paper easily and it does not snag as you change curve direction, or thicken and thin as a more italic drawing tool would. Of course a Sharpie is also designed to draw on glass as well as paper. The chosen Sharpie is a 'fine' one because its thickness is roughly the same as the thickness of the heart of a standard H section lead came.

The H section of lead came

Numbered cartoon and tracing (Nb the tracing has now been cut out along the border edge)

Once numbered in exactly the same way as the cartoon, the tracing was then cut out as a rectangle up to the edges of the glass cutting border, using normal good quality long bladed scissors. The traced cartoon edges are now as you can see from the image above, its borders. The next stage was to begin the process of cutting out the individual pieces of paper which will be used as templates that allow the transfer of the shapes to the pieces of glass that need cutting. However to do this special scissors are needed, alongside a very particular cutting action. 'Pattern shears' are used that cut away a strip of paper that is the same thickness as a lead came section. 

By cutting along the Sharpie lines with the pattern shears, you remove approximately 2mm, the gap required for the insertion of a standard H section lead came between glass sections.  However you need to make cuts using lots of quick small movements, if you want to cut a curve, which are a very different set of movements to those normally used when cutting with scissors. (I had to practice curve cutting first on a spare sheet of paper). Once you get the hang of it you can cut out the first few shapes. In my case we chose shapes of some blue and green pieces of glass that could be made from some off-cuts, so that I could practice glass cutting on pieces that were not too expensive. Once the paper templates were cut out I was then shown how to use these as stencils for marking out the glass pieces I needed (using a black Sharpie on clear glass, and a white one on dark glass), each time looking for useful existing design elements, such as a straight edge. If an off-cut had a straight edge this became a useful starting point for transferring the shape, as I could put straight edge to straight edge and save myself one line of cutting. Once traced out onto the glass pieces I began to start learning the processes associated with cutting glass.  

The pattern sheers

The thin strip of paper that the pattern shears leave behind

Before being allowed to use the actual pieces I had to practice on spare off-cuts. There were a few key lessons. The most important was getting my body into place so that I could see the glass cutter's cutting wheel really clearly. (Nb. during the previous week I had bought my own glass cutter and a can of sewing machine oil, which I used to fill the interior of the cutter, so that it was properly lubricated). By splaying my legs open wide I could get my eye level down to see the wheel as it scored the glass. By listening to the sound of the crackle that emerged as I moved the glass cutter along, I could check if I was holding it down with enough pressure. I was using my right hand for holding the glass cutter and pressing down, and left hand for guiding it along the line. After a few goes on scrap pieces of clear glass I was judged to be good enough to cut my 4 green and blue glass pieces, and I then cut them out without mistakes and they were put away for the next session. 

About to practice cutting a short curve using an off-cut of plain glass (note the way round the cutter is)

Holding glass ready to break it

There are a few more things to remember. Don’t start at the edge: Begin a score roughly 1/16 inch in from the edge, however you complete the score by rolling over the end edge. Try to achieve a smooth even consistent pressure all along the score, as well as trying to achieve a steady speed across the whole length of the line. (In one case when trying to score glass with a rougher surface I came to a halt, because I hit some sort of glass bump. I managed to then continue by putting the glass cutter back in exactly the same spot and carrying on. The glass broke along the line as it should have, but I had to use two pairs of pliers to hold it, rather than use the hand grip) You normally break the glass by holding it thumb on top and folded fingers below. (see image above) Hold arms out straight and downwards and once you are sure your bent fingers are close to the score but not straight underneath it, simply twist your wrists outwards. However through trial and error I found that when hard to break after scoring, you might need to hold with pliers and if so, best to start twisting a plier close to the edge where you finished the cut. I also sometimes found it useful to put the scored glass next to the table edge, then using the table as support, broke off the waste glass using glass pliers to hold it. 

I was also beginning to have to think about the fused glass areas. The most important being the 'pain' area around the heel. 

Detail of painted image that is being translated into stained glass

Detail of cartoon

In the cartoon this area had had to become clarified, but the painting pointed to a much more organic series of forms which had been evolved in relation to my earlier work on interoception and the representation of pain. So it was decided to use this area of the work to investigate fusing techniques. I therefore, using a found bowl of the right size, used it to draw out a circle on a glass kiln shelf that was approximately one centimetre in diameter wider than the circular area indicated in the cartoon. I then used a variety of course frits to build a form that was to be fired and that would by the nature of the way glass flows when heated have holes in it, that could be likened to some of the visual properties in the painting. Hopefully this will be fired during the week and responded to during the next session. 

 

Various course frits contained in a circle ready to be fired.

As always there were other things to consider. A good way to control the amount of frit used is to put some in the lid of the accompanying frit container. As you drop the frit, from the lid in order to achieve an open random feel to its distribution, there is a way of holding a frit container lid and moving it in a backward and forward rocking motion, alongside using a spare finger to tap the side of the lid, that helps give a better less 'clumped' distribution. 

Once you feel you have enough frit on the kiln shelf, the final issue is how to deal with all the frit that will have spilled out from your design. Using a fan shaped brush this was carefully collected and pushed towards the edges of the shape. However I had to be careful not to push these bits of frit into the circular mass, as this would build a 'wall' around the edge, and so I was careful to get these random frit pieces to touch but not to overlap too much, in this way I hoped to avoid an unsightly raised edge. 

Materials needed for session two

Large sheet of 90 gsm cartridge paper to make a tracing from the cartoon that will act as the main template. This was cut from a roll supplied by HSG.

Black Sharpie: £2.00

White Sharpie: £10.98

Good quality long bladed scissors to cut out the copied cartoon. Cost: £4.99

Lead Pattern shears Creative Glass Guild Cost: Cost: £8.50

Glass cutter: Oil Glass Cutter Silberschnitt 3000  Cost: £37.86 (including shipping and VAT)

Lubricating Oil for the glass cutter Cost: £8.39

Coloured glass: The glass cost depends on colour and type. In this case the pink I needed was obtained from Pearson's glass. One sheet 610 x 455mm of 'Lamberts Gold Pink on Clear' cost: £226.99

Frit and some cheaper glass types and colours were provided by Hannah Stained Glass. (HSG)

See also:

Session one

Session three

Session four

Session five

Stained glass artists

 

 

Defining art

Ad Reinhardt

When i was teaching I tended to respond to what was going on in the studio by developing blog posts that added to the issues being discussed. This meant I had several in reserve, so that if it was a quiet week in terms of issues raised, I had posts I could simply make live. I have quite a few of these saved and ready to go, so rather than leave these extra posts un-posted, I shall occasionally make what I think are interesting ones live. This reflection on defining art would have begun as part of a debate emerging from a critique. As these I'm sure still go on, I'm therefore throwing some old thoughts back into the ring.

In James Geary's book 'I is another' he explores how metaphor shapes the world, this is something every advertising designer knows all about, but do artists? When I talk to other artists I'm often told that they like to leave their work open ended, that they are not wanting to direct an audience's interests and that their work is open to interpretation. They shy away from the commercial world's use of persuasive rhetoric and would rather wait for the 'truth' or 'value' of their endeavours to be discovered by some discerning member of the public. This ambivalence is fine if the work exists on a level playing field, but in competition with other media images, I think that a lot of very good fine art just gets missed or lost under the sheer number of visual images that pervade our society. A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. A visual metaphor is similar and can often reveal hidden similarities between two different ideas. The fact that metaphor was taught as an aspect of rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, reminds us that historically art was made to have an effect on people and that it was clear to some aspects of society that the better you were taught to understand the art of rhetoric, (yes it was considered an art), the better you were going to be at convincing others that your viewpoint was right. At this point I might put forward the idea that the work of art is a metaphor for our mental life. But even as I do I can see its limitations and realise that in doing this I forget the huge impact my hands have on who I am and what I think. Therefore I change my mind and suggest that the work of art is to externalise thought. This is a slippery slope. The defining metaphors of our global society are I believe only gradually emerging and new metaphors are going to be necessary if we are to get to grips with the complex chaos that surrounds us. 

Nietzsche stated, "Tropes are not something that can be added or abstracted from language at will—they are its truest nature." I.e. that there is "no real knowing apart from metaphor."

We all need techniques for problem solving and learning; we need ways of encoding experience so that it become more understandable. Our behaviours are limited by the patterns we have learnt from experience and the available range of new experiences can be opened out by the generation of more connections between things and this can be where artists can help us all.

Artists are often engaged in a dialogue with the idea of what art is. It often feels as if before you can make any art you need to find out what the business of art is. Especially when I was at college back in the late 60s and early 70s, we had seemingly endless debates as to what it was we were involving ourselves with and the work some of us ended up making was designed to extend that debate. Looking back it seems rather simple and I'm not sure it advanced anything, except to widen our collective reading list. 

But as it is something that I know always interests at least a few students every year, I shall return to the debate if only for a short while. So I suppose I ought to try and define it, to attempt that thing that should never be attempted, which is to try once again to put forward my own idea of art, but here goes; 

'Artworks are human conceived things that illuminate relationships between themselves and other things'. 

It helps me if no one else to have a definition, because I can always when stuck ask myself, 'so what things are you relating here? I like this definition because it avoids the words 'understanding' or 'expression' or 'meaning'. 

Probably at some point in the life of most artists they will attempt to define what art is and this post gives me an excuse to list some of these: 

Below is a haphazard collected together list of artists trying to define art in no particular order and with no particular ranking as to success or failure. 

The first one, 'Judd's dictum' is by the artist Donald Judd and is probably the most boring as it doesn't really say anything we didn't already know and it isn't funny.

Judd's dictum

(art) The position that anything is art as long as somebody calls it art.

The second definition by Ad Reinhardt is similar to Judd's but it is slightly funnier. 

'Art Is Art and Everything Else Is Everything Else'. 

Reinhardt was also a cartoonist, so he was very aware of the funny side of art.  

Ad Reinhardt

Cartoons are always interesting because they reveal all sorts of prejudices and fixed ideas about art and they are often made during the period when one sort of art or another is becoming popular. In some ways they are also definitions of art, here are a few.

Richard Olden, March 20, 1971

William O’Brian, August 19, 1967

Both the cartoons above are comments on Ad Reinhardt's 'Ultimate paintings, which are at first glance simply black fields of colour. The cartoons represent the fact that most people's idea of art is something that is made from a direct observation of reality and that artists learn from copying the work of other artists, the master/apprentice system. 

Kovarsky

However the copying of the work of other artists has its own problems. Kovarsky's image is a comment on art education in the 1950s in New York. Educators like Hans Hofmann had a powerful influence at the time. Kovarsky believed that the education of the visual languages of expression led to the standardising and therefore weakening of the very expressive languages that were being taught.  

From Hans Hofmann's life class

Sam Feinstein: A drawing done in Hans Hofmann's life class

The point Kovarsky was making was that an art style could become a fixed and very restrictively focused lens through which life was looked at and when that happened it became almost impossible to see life for what it was. There was of course another aspect to Hofmann's teaching and that was that the dynamics of seeing were as important as the object being looked at and that these dynamics were what gave 'life' to the image. As Paul Klee stated, 'Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible'. As with most arguments there is a middle ground where things make more sense, binary thinking leading to conflict rather than consensus. 

A much more contemporary cartoon view on art is Anna Haifisch's 'The Artist'.

From: Anna Haifisch's 'The Artist'

Dean Vietor

John Deering

Beauty and truth have often been aspired to by artists. Ideas of perfection and the belief in ideals that transcend the everyday are also often found to be what drive artists to continue to search for that wonderful artwork that will transform our lives. As Keats put it in the last two lines of his poem, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', 

    "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

The relationship between truth and beauty has been somewhat tarnished over the last few years, and some would argue that we now live in a time of 'post-truth'. Keats would if writing now be seen as a very naive man, far too romantic for his own good. Definitions of art are still emerging and some seem to hang around more than others. 

Here are some famous artists speaking out on what art means for them:

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers and never succeeding. Marc Chagall

Art is filling a space in a beautiful way. Georgia O'Keeffe

Art is harmony. Georges Seurat

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth. Pablo Picasso 

To draw you must close your eyes and sing. Pablo Picasso

To give a body and a perfect form to one’s thought, this, and only this, is to be an artist. Jacques-Louis David

Ideas alone can be works of art….All ideas need not be made physical.…A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist’s mind. Sol LeWitt

Art is a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue. Henri Matisse 

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see. Edgar Degas

Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art. Andy Warhol

Life is art. Art is life. I never separate it. Ai Weiwei

What is art? Art grows out of grief and joy, but mainly grief. It is born of people’s lives. Edvard Munch

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography. Federico Fellini

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus. David Hockney

Art is everywhere you look for it; hail the twinkling stars for they are God’s careless splatters. El Greco

Art is a harmony parallel with nature. Cezanne

Art is a mad search for individualism. Gauguin

Art is a line around your thoughts. Gustav Klimt

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth. Duchamp

Art is an experience, not an object. Robert Motherwell

Art is an effort to make you walk a half an inch above ground. Yoko Ono

So as you can see a lot of artists have had a go at trying to define what it is that they are involved in. My earlier definition, 'Artworks are human conceived things that illuminate relationships between themselves and other things', already feels out of date, perhaps this is more like it, 'Art is a ritual designed to attune us to the ever unfolding act of creation'. It's ok but nowhere as poetic as Picasso's advice to those of us who love drawing; 'To draw you must close your eyes and sing'.

Roy Lichtenstein: Brushstrokes

I have had to rethink my ideas on manifestos recently because I have been undertaking a course on permaculture. Therefore I am looking at writing a manifesto for art practice based on permaculture's 12 principles. I did have a stab at that a while ago, here, but now that I have completed the course feel that I have a bit more understanding of what the original principles were about. So in a time of global warming and potential climate chaos, it would seem not inappropriate to attempt to define these principles again, especially if they are designed to be planet aware. So I'm afraid I shall return to the subject again, perhaps attempting to link awareness of permaculture principles with the idea of an artist being a sort of dream crafter for the collective and that the nature outside of ourselves, is in fact the same as the one inside of ourselves. 

You might want to try writing your own manifesto. If so there are a few books to look at that might help.

Michalis, P. Editor (2019) Publishing Manifestos: An International Anthology from Artists and Writers New York: The MIT Press. This is a great book as it covers a wide range of contemporary art practices. Manifestos by artists, authors, editors, publishers, designers and zinesters, reflect the fact that old boundaries between the arts are breaking down.

Deepwell, K. (2022) Fifty Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology, 1965-2021 London: KT Press

Eidson, A. (2018) Anti-Art Manifesto Kindle Edition A manifesto outlying methods by which we can destroy art as we know it.

Danchev, A. (2011) 100 Artists' Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists London: Penguin

Van Doesburg 1918

See also:

Trying to define the empty page before creation begins

What it might be all about

Drawing it all together

Why do I draw?

Training the eyes

The fate of cartoonists

Stained glass bursary: Session 1

I have been awarded an AN bursary and it is to support me in developing new skills in stained glass making. One of the things I have to do is to develop a report on the experience and to explain how these new skills will help me to move on as an artist. This blog it would seem to me is an ideal place within which to reflect on the processes involved in undertaking the bursary. Those of you who follow these posts and who are students, will perhaps feel at times anxious when learning a new skill, as skills take time to develop and it takes a while to see how you might use them to develop your art work. So hopefully seeing how another person reflects on the process might be useful. On the other hand some of the people who follow this blog are experienced hands and might want to see how a new skill can revitalise a well established body of working procedures and processes. 

Because this blog is centred on how drawing helps with problem solving, I shall also show how it is central to the thinking processes related to the development of this new set of skills. In particular how cartoons are used as a central element of both the design process and the practical construction of a stained glass panel. 

The bursary is paying for 15 three hour taught sessions at Hannah Stained Glass and I will reflecting on each session as it occurs.

Session one

Drawing up a cartoon

Before undertaking the sessions I had to decide what sort of work I wanted to translate into glass. I had originally wanted to add glass to my skill set because I felt it had spiritual qualities due to the illumination that emerges from the penetration of light through the materials of its making. It also involves working with an intensity of colour that can be emotionally very powerful. Therefore during the summer before the sessions started I began a series of paintings designed to attune myself to a colour range that I could see working in glass. I was also wanting to develop a series of images that furthered my ideas concerning animism, and in this case I decided to focus on developing a series of images related to my boyhood experience of having a Sooty glove puppet. All children seem to be able to channel feelings and thoughts through inanimate objects, be these dolls, toy soldiers or other play things and now I am a grandad I see this very clearly when I watch my grandchildren play, and so decided to revisit a time when  Sooty acted as my surrogate and showed me how to do things I couldn't. A shaman would understand the process very clearly and I have always been drawn towards the art of people who lived thousands of years ago. An ability to use psychic energy to inhabit a landscape feature or channel an animal spirit must have been very useful to any shaman who was embedded amongst the tribes of indigenous peoples that inhabited these islands in the time before the Roman's came, and perhaps at some future date there will be a return to similar ways of engaging with the world.

I began as usual with drawing, filling many sketchbook pages with simple images. 

Sketchbook images

Once I had an idea of where the images were going, (I was particularly drawn to my 1950s experience of watching films with Sooty at the old Gaumont cinema in Dudley, where my mother worked as an usherette), I began to work the images up in more detail and to revisit old sketchbooks where I had previously touched upon the idea. 

Key to these ideas was the fact that Sooty had golden yellow artificial fur. This became the colour key for the development of the paintings that were to become the forerunners for the stained glass image ideas. 

A1 and A0 sized acrylic paintings

I had recently developed plantar fasciitis, so had a lot of pain in my heel and it therefore seemed to me that I could use the Sooty figure in a similar fashion to how I had previously used votive ideas, as a sort of material intermediary in a psychic process that could help externalise and remove the pain. This also helped me to further my investigations in relation to visualising interoceptive experiences, (in this case pain), so I was confident that these images would be about real experiences and that they would enable me to continue the development of my personal mythos and image narratives which constitute the bedrock out of which my artwork emerges. 

I had to eventually stop painting and choose an image to work from, especially as for the first session I had been asked to draw up a cartoon of what I wanted to do.

This image was decided upon as the instigator or model for the stained glass 

A1 size acrylic painting of Sooty acting to relieve my plantar fasciitis, with accompanying cartoon

Initial cartoon with idea for border

I had no idea what the cartoon should be like, so I guessed I would have to put an idea together about where the leading would go and I also guessed that the painting could operate as a colour reference. 

Once in the workshop and presenting what I had done as preliminary work, I was made to realise that I hadn't really understood the real nature of a stained glass cartoon. The leading is incidental, yes it is needed to tie everything together, but the cartoon is used to determine the exact shapes of the pieces of glass that need cutting out. Leading is of course going to be the way the pieces are eventually going to be held together, however just as glueing is going to be the way a collage is eventually held together, and will be vital to the success of your collage, you would not begin with or foreground the glueing. Media specificity is vital here. An idea can still operate in a different medium, but it will work differently. Its form needs to be reshaped to fit the nature of the specific materials that will now be used and what is communicated will now include narratives specific to this new medium. Media specificity also includes an awareness of the constructional processes that are needed to make sure the materials are used in such a way that they will not fall apart because of a lack of understanding of their nature. Perhaps later you might want to break the rules, but that is something that has to be done with a good understanding of the rules you are breaking. I.e. I have had to hold myself back from playing, but I'm still planning to do that later. 

I was asked to begin a new cartoon drawing. My original drawing was A1 size and I was also asked to slightly reduce this, as my piece was going to be freestanding, and without the extra support of a solid window frame and cross bars, an image that big would be subject to a lot of stresses and strains and could be liable to break. I was then asked to make another cartoon that sat within the edges of a new sheet of paper and not to simply use the edge of the paper as the edge of the drawing as I had done before. The frame is vital to the structural integrity of a stained glass piece and by making my image go to the edge of my paper, I had not given myself any room to detail the specific framing information needed. 

As this is going to be a freestanding panel, it was decided to use zinc came as the supportive edging material. This decision gave us certain information. Zinc U Section Came is 12 x 5mm and it comes in 2 Metre lengths, but these 2 Metre lengths will be cut in half for posting unless requested otherwise, and an additional cost will apply on full lengths. (I'll separate out costings and suppliers but getting to become aware of these things is as much a part of learning a craft as the actual doing of it)

The supplier gives a specification as above, but in order to make the drawing more information is needed so it was decided to divide the 12mm width up into three sections as in the drawing below. 

I was now able to begin my cartoon and draw out the frame in such a way that it was going to be very clear where the edges of my glass would go. 

The Zinc U Section Came is set out as light pencil and the edge where the glass will go is identified by a black Sharpie line. In fact all the shapes for the glass will become defined by using a black Sharpie to set out their boundaries. The thickness of the Sharpie in effect replacing the 1mm thickness of the zinc. The frame drawing is carefully checked for accuracy before then moving on to draw the actual design. 

Redrawing the cartoon

The first cartoon is then analysed for weaknesses and to see if there are any decisions that would result in hard to cut or too thin areas of glass. It was decided that there were several problems. The first were to do with a lack of structural integrity that was due to long lines of continuous leading that went down through the design of the leg area and the fact that I was suggesting the use of quite large pieces of glass. This could be overcome with a combination of staggering lines and cutting across these lines with smaller pieces of glass.

Main initial problems identified from the first cartoon.

I had tended to think of the leading as making up the edges of each image, but for instance where the toes are drawn there is a tight curve, this can be overcome by painting in the shape of the toes, inside a wider shape formed by the leading. This was an issue that needed resolving throughout the cartoon, therefore a 'double drawing' was decided upon. A black Sharpie would be used to determine edges of the glass and pencil shading to determine where painting would be needed to clarify the design. 

Another issue was the relation between the border and the image. The border is useful as it helps give structural integrity and contains the image. One of the problems with stained glass designs is that they can visually push out from a centre and that means that the eyes are tempted to follow the implied trajectory of the lines of leading, which tend to lead away from the centre. A border helps stop this and the observer's gaze is held within the frame. However the border can become separate and operate simply as a containing device, so something needs to be done to resolve this. 

In the case of the image I was working on, because one element (the arm) comes in from the side, it was decided to use this as a way of integrating the border into the design and to follow the implication of the form out into the border. 

The second cartoon

The new cartoon has several changes, the most important being that the Sharpie lines now represent the actual edges of the pieces of glass. If this passes muster, (which it may not), then the next job will be to make a tracing of it and to cut out all the sections, so that I have templates from which I can cut glass pieces.

Detail of cartoon

The edges of the area that will be painted onto the glass is ghosted in pencil 

I have tried to eliminate any really tight curves or sharp points, but whether these have been sorted out properly, will depend on whether glass can be cut sufficiently precisely. I have also tried to make more edges straight as these are much easier to cut. 

I then roughed up a colour idea in Photoshop, after scanning in the hand drawn cartoon. This was made to be able to assess the warm/cool colour balance and to check how the yellow of Sooty would sit with a pink/violet complementary set of leg forms.

Colour rough

The colour rough isn't something I am going to copy, it is simply to give me an idea of where I'm going. The area around the heel is treated differently, because this is where I will try and work more directly with the glass, and will develop fused glass textures to try and replicate the pain feeling that I tried to depict in the painting. 

Sooty will be more defined and Medieval looking. 

Study for stained glass Sooty

Because the next session would involve glass cutting, I was told I needed to have my own glass cutter by then and was shown examples of the type to buy, which had reservoirs for the necessary lubrication oil inbuilt into their handles. 

Materials needed for session 1

Paper, sketchbooks, ink, paint etc for developing design ideas

Paper for cartoons

2B and HB pencils to draft out designs 

Rubber to remove pencil adjustments

A black fine line Sharpie to draw up finished cartoon

Computer and Photoshop software to develop colour roughs for cartoon

See also: 

Stained glass session two

Stained glass session three

Stained glass session four

Stained glass session five

Some earlier thoughts on stained glass

Williams and Byrne (A company that works with the traditional skills I'm learning)