I often draw sketches of grass and twigs, mushrooms and leaves. Mostly they are cobweb-type drawings that have overlaid images as if I was moving from one object to the other. These drawings cover my napkins, notes from meetings at work and receipts from the grocery store. Usually, I do not finish them and do not keep them.
These fairy forest images are the first thing my mind drifts to when I have a moment of boredom and a pencil in my hand. I like them quite a bit and have tried numerous times to transform them into stained glass patterns. I have to say, my rate of success has been pretty low.
With the rigid rules imposed by the seams in stained glass, there Is no such thing as overlaid images. And, once I take that aspect out, most of my sketches seem to become uninteresting, at least to me. Maybe, I should learn some new techniques, start painting on glass, layering, and maybe even fusing… All that sounds pretty tempting and I hope to get to it one day…
Despite all this, I have succeeded in creating fairy forest stained glass pieces at least twice. I'd like to show you the first such success, my Tiger Thistle in a Fairy Fog panel I made in December of 2009. I have to say that it has started off as a much busier sketch, but, as always with stained glass, I had to pare it down to a bare minimum. So, here they are, three blades of an unknown magical fern and a single thistle.
The glass I used was a black/blue/green granite with wonderful color variations, an orange mottle and a milky glass with weak dark purple streaks for the background. I used a slice of agate for the middle of the thistle, and I think it added a lot of texture.