Painting on glass is a little more complicated than painting on canvas because the image is made for lighting on both sides of the glass. This way, you can not just paint out details you don't like, but you can refuse or change any paint you are not happy with before it is fired. Bruce has been painting on glass since the late 60s. The fragment on the left is an early experimental fragment that we discussed earlier. It takes 16 burns. He became a master in this art, as well as the keeper of the 16th century Axt collection of medallions and anonymous private collection of 11-17th-century glass. He has also worked as a technical consultant at the Maritime National Museum in San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Arts in Washington, D.C. The photograph below shows the work he was able to do with glass paint later in his career. The panel is approximately nine by twelve inches of reproduction he made in 1985 a Swiss stained glass window called the priest Paul. It depicts Protestant monsters grinding Catholics. Two glass elements of each of the 13 separate shots and countless hours of shooting.
For the most part, Bruce's drawing skills on the glass for large works are translated directly into the small scale required for beads. One area that needed to be modified was the use of patterns, black contours. In large works, these lines are usually applied with a brush. For beads, this is difficult because you need a brush so thin that it is not practical. So Bruce uses the pen to draw, like on the left. The pens allow you to accurately control the thickness of the tracing line from about 16 inches to almost nothing, changing the pressure he uses on the pen. You can get needle tips of different flexibility to suit your needs. This change in the small scale beads also caused the change in paint it uses for tracing. The clove oil mixes well with the paint and flows smoothly off the pen. In addition, it is surface tension is such that it does not wet and does not spread on the glass after it is applied, which allows it to get very fine lines in its work. People with a fatal allergy to clove oil, which can cause cardiac arrhythmias, can replace anise oil. Either of these two oils can be diluted with lavender oil up to about 20% by volume if necessary. More than this amount will cause the paint to spread on the glass. To get other colors in the image, Bruce adds thin translucent layers of paints or enamels, called matt ones. In the example of a drawn table, he mixes the matting ink powder with clove oil. He also sometimes uses Ruesche paint or lavender oil, depending on how thin and spreading the paint he wants. Matte can be applied locally with different tone densities or evenly to large areas of the image. Local applications are used to shade the image and are applied with a brush to a small area. A typical set of applicators can be seen in the photo on the right on the next page. A uniform application, called a flat matte application, gives the background that forms the basis of the image.
This is achieved by the first application on a thin coating of paint, with a soft applicator brush to the desired density as evenly as possible. Then the mat is immediately "mixed" or smoothed out, slightly brushing it with a special brush called a badger blender, like the ones on the left. They are caused by this because they are made of badger hair about 3-4" long. The blender is held perpendicular to the glass, as it is slightly swept along the matt surface. The matt matte is matted from several different directions to provide a homogeneous surface. Bruce brushes his brushes using the same media used with the paint. He wipes his palette with a paper towel, which he considers to be toxic waste, and then adds some oil to the palette, gently pushing the brush into it, and then wipes it on a paper towel. He repeats this until everything is cleaned. Then he washes the brushes with soap and water. Then, with his badger brush, he dries them by scrolling the handle between his palms to keep them light and fluffy. The rest will be dried with a soft towel. After applying matting paint, it can be textured or modified either wet or dry, using brushes or needles to move the material around or remove it. For example, when mixed, if Bruce is just cleaning in one direction, he can get a matte finish that changes in density along the direction of the brush. The use of shorter stiff brushes will increase the speed at which the density changes.