Vase with a handbag

My recent piece of painted glass - a vase with a personalised handbag and flowers. A commission from my colleague A. and also a birthday gift for a lady. The design has been entirely chosen by my colleague including the central design, flowers and colours. Hope the gift was well received :)

To paint the bag I used a pearlised semi-translucent Pebeo Prisme paint and filled the hearts at the bottom with a transparent vitrail paint for a peeking effect and contrast. Quite pleased with the wording too :) Overall  - a girly gift for a stylish lady :)

Flower Power Owl

...So I had this funny shaped square vase - very broad and flat at the front and very narrow on the sides. Perfect for putting a vibrant colourful motif. The owl was my choice. I'd never painted one so I was dying to see what it looked like on the glass. A flower-power, sorta hippie-style owl with a blossom look :)))

The glass paints look very fluorescent in the photos, in fact they are less so. However the colours are very vibrant and flashy. Don't you just love her blossom-shaped eyes? :)) Well, I do!

Vase with orange textured Marimekko flowers

Another of my recent paintings - a vase with a Marimekko flower pattern. This is the 3rd vase I've painted with this type of broad splat flowers. They are one of my favourite motifs for glass - they are big, easy to paint and give vase lots of coloured area but at the same time they leave some empty space in between. As a result it looks as if the flowers clung to the glass :) 

For this vase I decided to experiment a bit with the texture. Normally I pool the paint evenly within the outlines and let it dry in peace. The glass paint starts to form some sort of a "skin" until it finally sets and touch-dries. This time I used a thickening, near-jellied glass paint and put some layers of it one over the other. Then, as the paint was drying up, I kept on touching  and disturbing the painted surface by dabbing it with my paintbrush and leaving the brushstrokes visible. This gave the flowers a thicker, more "disturbed" textured surface that reminds of a translucent gel rather than a runny paint.

Rough, textured surface, deliberate streaks of paints and layered paint give the vase more "rugged" "folky" and "hand-made" look :) 

So...What do you think? 

Tube Vase with Hearts

Another, the 3rd tube vase I've painted recently. Simple freehand pattern with hearts. The vitrail colours mixed and I used a golden relief paste. It sold on one of the fairs as a present for a girl :)

 and the  two of my tube vases, side by side...

and all the 3 types together :) Pretty nice in a group, eh?

Love to see how some plain pieces of glass turn into something colourful and vibrant :)

Vase with butterflies

Another tube vase I have painted recently :) I thought some butterflies would look good on it :) The tubular shape is a bit awkward to paint and to place patterns inside so I kept the motifs simple. The vase has been on sale on my fairs this year. 

Vase with pansies

Another of my recently painted pieces of glass - a vase (can also serve as a bowl for floating candles) with pansies :) The pattern comes from an archival issue of Crafts Beautiful magazine but I haven't got a clue what year.issue it was as I received a cut-out with this pattern from a colleague. 

Spent quite a lot of time painting this one as the paint kept on leaking and streaking down all the time. This is always the case when you paint curved surfaces and the runnier paint, the worse. Must have used millions of cotton buds to wipe off the streaks :-/ Finally the paint was dryish and thick enough to stop leaking over the relief outlines. Used a new paint on the flowers - Pebeo Prisme (new on the market), which turned out to be translucent in the sunlight. 

Twin Vases with an entwining leaf motif

Long time no painted glass! Finally I managed to dig out my glass paints and sit down to some painting. With the 1st fair came some new glass painted works. Here are the 1st pieces of my glass art - two twin vases with a leafy motif entwining them.

This time I felt sort of coming back to basics that is using a basic black outliner as in stained glass windows and some mixture of shaded reds, orange and yellows.

The pattern on the vases is a freehand pattern. Simple but pretty eye-catching :)

Very Berry :)

Sunday evening is a Hand-made Monday time, which is where I am linking up tonight :) I've got two craft pieces to present today. The first one is a festive bird on a holly bush from the mid-week post - see here - CLICK.

Another painted vase inspired by the nature itself. This time it's a berry motif. I find it so simple and so lovely - the sight of a branch with red winter berries in a glassy vase or intertwined into a wreath or simply berries growing on a bush, covered with ice :) The motif has been painted on the front only and it meant to look lightweight and delicate. "Not too much" - was my painting rule.

The silver twigs are meant to evoke the feeling of frost and coldness and the red berries suggest that somewhere under the snow and ice some life still exists :) For more pretty pictures of berries, please see my Pinterest board - CLICK. 

Now I'm off to hop around some blogs to see what other have been doing this week :) 

Vase with a festive bird and a holly bush

My next creation from the last week: a chunky glassy vase with a red festive bird and branches of holly bush scattered on the remaining 3 walls. A simple but charming motif. This one was pleasure to paint :) Winter birds and holly bush are one of my favourite motifs in crafts.

Knotted Thoughts...

My recent vase painted with vitrail glass paints in a style resembling Celtic knots. Decorated with golden outliner and glass nuggets.

Poppy vase

This is a small poppy vase I painted on a colleague's request from her own glass painting kit :) The poppy pattern was included in the glass painting kit and so was the relief outliner. I used my own paints tho. Not sure about you but I like to see this bloody red being embraced by a golden outliner and contrasting nicely with a transparent green. What do you think, huh?

 

Clicking through the internet pages I've come across Wordle - an online applet to create your own word clouds. I love languages so I couldn't resist it :D Here is my tag cloud done for my hobby no.1 - glass painting :)

Grapevine Vase

One of my recent creations - a square vase with a purple grapevine motif. Simple and minimal in decoration as it meant to be. Fine! Now, that I've finished it, I feel like revamping it a bit LOL Maybe with some more grape vine leaves on the side walls? What do you reckon? As you can see, sometimes my visions for the painted glass are very prone to fluctuating...

So, does that happen to you too? That feeling to change something once you've just finished creating it? Well, it's not all said and done for me, as I still can add some new painting to the existing one ;)

Some details of the painting...

This week has been moderately busy for me. Spent the last days of it preparing for another summer fair - Offa's Festival in Wrexham. This one turned out to be a little more successful than the disappointing one from 2 weeks ago as more people at the event equals more potential customers. It also seemed like my Houses of Love and the Seahorses were the most eye-catching and intriguing motifs of all. (Should I paint some more of them then?) The weather was fab today! Also the location was pretty good. The other craft stalls were interesting and it was great to see so much variety of crafts. Made friends with some new crafters and enjoyed my selling time today!

Oh! And last but not least, thank you Anna of Puppy Fly Boutique blog for your lovely blog award x x x Pleasure to receive this one! :)

Get clicking guys and see what others have been up to this week. The link-up Hand made Monday party on Wendy's blog :) Check this out!

Ribbit! Ribbit!

A vase with frogs. Commission from a colleague. Meant to be a Christmas gift for her mum, who loves frogs and collects frog figurines. The frogs were to be cartoon characters and they were my colleague's choice :) I painted them all fresh and grassy green :) Hope the vase will be well received :) Pretty cheerful frogs, huh?

And some details of the painting:

Oh! And today I'm linking at Friday Link Party at Creation Corner Check this out guys!

Oldies from the past: My First vases

One of my first vases I painted in the past. First one was an experiment with a self-adhesive lead tape and acetate mosaic-like tiles. Second one is a try at using peel off stickers and filling them in with the glass paints and the 3rd one is an attempt at free hand outlining.

Oldies from the past: My glass painting beginnings. How it all began…

I’ve always loved pictures painted on the glass. I can’t tell what exactly attracted me to them, maybe that smooth glassy surface covered with the transparent eye-catching colours contrasting with the uneven texture of the flowing lines, or maybe the intense rainbow colours and their transparency… or maybe all of these things. I loved especially those with some sort of fabulous whimisical dream-like late night scenery, where a thick deep blue inky night of a vitrail paint surrounds the golden-honey stars and moon outlined with a silver contour paste. Everything was so colourful, fairy-tale like, esoteric… The colours were flowing and the lines were curling and swirling all over the glass. I remember that as a child I looked at those pictures as if iI had been hypnotized. I wanted them! I craved them! I wanted to know how to paint them!

I used to see them at the craft shows during the big events in my town. The pictures were painted either by some freelance self-named artists or by the handicapped and sold to raise the money for the local school for the special needs children.

A few years later, as a tutor and student at the same time, I got 2 glass painted gifts from two different pupils. They were a thank-you gift for the whole year of teaching them English. Again, holding  in my hand a piece of mysteriously painted glass, I stared and stared and stared… thinking: what if I tried it myself one day?

Then a new chapter of my life began – moving and living in the UK. February 2008. A new opportunity for developing a brand new hobby arose and the deeply rooted idea of painting on the glass came up to the surface again – I had been taken to a Hobby Craft shop for the first time by my bf. Amazed by the vast craft supplies at that shop, I just couldn’t stop thinking about buying my first few pots of glass paint. And then THE DAY had come! I bought my first glass painting kit – 4 pots of vitrail paint, a tube of outliner, a brush and a pair of glassy votives. I rushed home quickly to see what it feels like to paint on the glass. I fell in love with it! I started and I couldn’t stop… and I still can’t :)

Now, my early works… those days when everything still seemed soooo difficult – piping, outlining, choosing colours and style, smooth even coverage, curvy surfaces, grasping the proportions… Bottles, votives, jars, simple vases – I tried them first, as well as painting on an acetate to get the knack of it.

Below here are a first few examples of my very early works…

I've also painted on an acetate to make transparent window art pictures...

Celestial motifs have always been my favourite! This Sun & Moon Vase was a gift to my bf's mum.

To be continued...