Stained glass portrait.

Started work today in on the stained glass portrait. It is to be an appliqué project, with the cut and intricately shaped coloured glass bonded to a sheet of plain float glass to form the image. 

We saw in a previous post how to turn a photograph into a workable cartoon, I have made several copies of this. The first is fixed underneath the float glass and is centralised to balance the picture (the original was off centre with the top part missing). I then cut a thin border from a beautiful dark brown glass and bonded it to the picture glass. The next copy is waterproofed and placed on an assembly board. This is used to fit and check fit all the glass pieces before they are bonded, this prevents scratches, chips and spreading the bonding agent. The next couple of copies are used to cut the pattern blanks which are then traced around onto the glass so an accurate shape can be cut; I'll cover that in another post. 

In the picture, the image on the left is the actual glass sheet with the border bonded to it, and on the right is a check image with all the green pieces (the tree background) in place; for anyone interested, that is a full days work.