How to color the art glass?

12 February 2014 Written by  

Fused glass technique gives great opportunities. It's equally perfect for the applied arts and for the installation art and sculptures.

If you want your glass work to be colorful you have to acquaint yourself with some coloring techniques.

At the early project phase, you have to know the possibilities and the limits of those methods. In other words, from the very beginning you have to be conscious about the whole production process you're about to initialize.

What should you know first? For example: The same layer of paint on the paper and on the glass looks completely different. The range of colors is large but has its limits- some stains are completely unavailable, be prepared for that. You might have some technical problems with color mixing. Some stains doesn't go together, in high temperatures they can occur chemical reactions and eventually we can end up with brown-greyish tint instead of e.g. pink, blue and yellow.

It's useful to prepare some glass samples in order to try every tint we want to apply in our work in various gradations and combinations.

While creating art glass panel from the pictures below, we had to face some unpredicted technical problems. Despite the fact that on the samples everything worked well, one of the colors has induced a micro cracking of the glass sheet. We had to start all over again and fortunately the second attempt was successful!

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