I am painting a LOT of drapery lately with our 12 Apostles windows. The long sweeping sections are the most challenging! There will be plenty of light to illuminate these windows, so we can use good depth for the base matt and create some really strong highlights directly against the darkest shadow with plenty […]

  Today I have an old school pro-tip that some of you may not have heard of – using melted beeswax to temporarily adhere your pieces of glass for painting to your tempered glass easel. In this way you can work upright and get all your painted detail to follow through accurately. It does, however, […]

  Wishing you all a very happy and safe Christmas and New Year. ~ Laura & John

Stained glass painting is a fascinating (and occasionally frustrating!) process. Our old boss Roy described it as not fixating on the mark the brush makes, but the area around it. It’s quite different to other types of painting as it is predominantly done in the negative, which involves a different kind of thinking and planning to […]

  I love it when a plan comes together….. Restoration pieces completed and ready for installation this week, new glass painting well underway.  

  There has been quite a bit of etching to do for our Twelve Apostles project. To achieve this effect, a specialist “flashed” glass is used; when this glass is made it is blown to have a thin “flash” of colour over (usually) a clear glass. A resist is then applied to the areas where you want […]

  Lots of acid etching in the top sections of this full-on figurative commission, and of course a lot of painting to do. The full size drawings (known as cartoons) are completed for the first 6 of our Twelve Apostles project. Got to get the next 6 drawings finished asap!

  We are just back from installing this window at Our Lady of the Valley, Coldstream. Gorgeous mouth blown glass, acid etching and a plethora of glass painting techniques were used to create the flora, fauna and vibrancy of the local area.  

  The majority of painted, stained and kiln fired glass you see in buildings throughout the world are created by painting in the negative. What do you mean by this I hear you say? The paint oxide is applied over the entire surface of the glass and removed to produce the tones, semi-tones and highlights. […]

  I’m well underway with the cartoons (full size drawing) for our 12 Apostles 154 square ft window – it’s a lot of figurative drawing for sure! Pictured here is when I was doing the first two sections, when the Peter cartoon was finished and I was drafting the Andrew figure. Some of you may […]

  We are pleased to have installed our 19th window at St Mary’s Kerrisdale this week! This latest one depicts St Mary Magdalene and turned out to be one of our favourites. It seemed appropriate that we were able to get the window in during the run up to Easter, in that Mary Magdalene was […]

It’s really great to be getting toward the end of this project. That sounds as though we found it really tedious! Quite the opposite in fact; Our Lady of the Valley has been a delight to work on. But now that John has finished leading all the sections and has completed cementing them (the term […]

I finished these water colour designs last year, not long after we were into the first wave of Covid. Now, the church is ready to start this 154 square foot project. I’ve spent days assessing what glass and etching and painting techniques we want to go with. I’ve started setting out the initial drawings for […]

I’ve been very busy with the full size drawings (cartoons) for the next three windows in our sequence of Old Testament windows for St. Joseph’s in Langley. They are Moses and the Exodus, Abraham and the Sacrifice of Issac, and Elijah taken up in Chariot of Fire.  I must admit to enjoying drawing the horses […]

Thought for the day: Bee well, bee happy!(detail; acid etching and glass painting, Our Lady of the Valley, currently being leaded.)

Shown here are the three sections of Our Lady of the Valley window laid out on the light table and benches, prior to the final kiln firing stage for silver stain to turn some of the details amber and gold, such as the roses, butterfly and bee. Then it’s fabrication time!

  Really pleased to have installed the next two windows in our sequence of Old Testament windows for St. Joseph’s, Langley. Our mentor used to say that he enjoyed creating really stern looking Old Testament figures with their craggier appearances, John prefers the terms slightly grumpy, or windswept and interesting. Here we have Moses and […]

I thought I’d post a few shots taken of my hubby John working on our window for Our Lady of The Valley, Coldstream BC. ~ The first photo shows John cutting the selected glass over the “cutline” structural drawing. ~ Each piece of cut glass after being trace-lined and fired is then placed on a […]

  This month marks my 20th anniversary of being elected an AMGP, an Associate of The British Society of Master Glass Painters. Their Journal is published annually in London, UK, by the BSMGP, and I always look forward to receiving it each year. It’s a wonderful collection of insightful essays on a multitude of stained […]

  Once upon a time (or last week, if you prefer) there was a sure-footed artist named John who was called upon to install our latest window at St Mary’s Church, Kerrisdale. This window depicted an awesome woman of the 12th century named Saint Hildegard. Now, upon this day it seemed that everyone wanted to […]