We have just installed our St Phocas window for St Mary’s Kerrisdale. It is the last clerestory window, the 22nd that we have done for this church since 2007. We will miss woking on a couple of these little windows each year, but I’m pretty sure that John won’t miss accessing the cedar shingle roof for the […]

In my last post I had just finished the design for our 22nd (and last) clerestory window for St Mary’s Kerrisdale. Since then we have been pretty busy progressing the project; the full size hand drawn cartoon was completed, then the structural drawing or cutline was created from that and then the glass selected and cut. […]

We have the go ahead for the last of 22 windows at St Mary’s Kerrisdale! We started off with St Brigid in 2007 and we will end with St Phocas the Gardener. I have just finished the watercolour design at my preferred scale of 2” to 1 ft, but these windows are not very big so […]

As some of you may remember, I’ve discussed previously about how restoration can sometimes be as much forensic as artistic; the need to ascertain exactly how a piece was originally painted in order to recreate it as accurately as possible. In the case of these windows the challenge was to identify the causes of the excessive bowing […]

We are really pleased to have recently installed our 20th and 21st clerestory windows for St Mary’s Kerrisdale – only one left now waiting for a special benefactor.   The first of these windows that we were commissioned to make was back in 2007 and depicted St Brigid. Over the years since, we have had […]

Painting in the style of another artist is one way to practice and hone glass painting skills. When we apprenticed in England, repeated work on damaged windows was a mainstay of our education. Creating a new piece that accurately matches an original painted by an artist who has been dead for over a hundred years […]

We’re so happy to have installed the last five windows in our sequence of twelve Old Testament windows in St Joseph’s, Langley! We have been working on and off with this project since 2019 (designed in 2017 but took a while to gain momentum) windows were commissioned one or two at a time as benefactors […]

I was looking back through some older images and I came across one that made me smile. This image of a menorah always reminds me of when we first arrived in Canada in 2005. It reminds me of difficulties because our belongings got stuck in a strike and so we couldn’t set up our home […]

  Today’s blast from the past is a window that we did back in 2002 when we had a studio in the UK, it was produced for another stained glass company in Cardiff, S Wales, one of the 39 dotted around the globe we used to supply with our artwork. They wanted a depiction of […]

We had a lovely lunch with the Epiphany Sacred Arts Guild yesterday to celebrate our new studio, followed by a “Show and Tell” of the last five windows in our Old Testament series for St Joseph’s Langley. Good food and good friends!  

One of the best artists I’ve known personally, James A Crombie ARCA, AMGP, said to me “If you think you know everything in a medium, you have no where else to go with it”. He was in his eighties at the time. Painting by hand with brushes in the medium of stained glass is something I’ve been […]

The process of creating authentic stained glass has many steps and uses many different types of artistic skills, but I think my favourite part is drawing the full size cartoon. The word “cartoon” derives from the Italian word “cartone” meaning large paper, artists would use this preparatory drawing as a blueprint for the primary artistic endeavour which was in a […]

We recently received a blast from the past in the form of a letter from St Peter’s church in South Barrow, Somerset, UK. Back in 2003 we created a window for this lovely church which depicted symbolism of St Peter and an abstract expression of the beautiful local countryside. At that time our primary contact […]

  It’s so great to be finally working on our commissions in our new studio! The renovations and moving were hard work but it was so worth it. We took the opportunity to build bigger glass racks, upgrade the lighting system in our light table, improve the leading benches, add an additional bench for glass cutting […]

We’re working hard renovating our new studio – it will feel like a rest when we finally get back to creating stained glass! I’m so excited to get moved in and make the most of the wonderful north facing light.

Last week was the culmination of twenty months of hard work, with the installation of our Twelve Apostles windows at St Francis Xavier, Vancouver. We are so pleased with how the windows look and how they have changed the interior of the church. It is quite a large space and the strong colour and shape really […]

Happy BC Day from sunny Vancouver! I recently finished the cartoon (full size drawing) for the next in our series of 12 Old Testament windows. This time it’s the turn of Noah and his Ark, and we’re looking forward to getting started on fabricating this one. Anyone notice that in depictions of this theme the […]

                                My old boss used to say; “a good glass painter will improve upon the cartoon”,  generally if I was painting one of his. It’s nice to be able to say that my painter has achieved this (under my critical […]

In glass painting the oxide is applied over the entire surface of the glass and removed to produce the tones, semi-tones and highlights – painting in the negative. It’s not the brush mark itself that you’re solely concentrating on, but the shapes created around it that give you the illusion of three dimensions. The most […]

  Painting an expression on a snake……not an everyday occurrence.