Painted Glass
You can create beautiful gifts and decorative items for your home with these simple glass and acrylic painting techniques. Select enamels, stained glass or regular glass paint to decorate windows and other glass or acrylic surfaces. These types of paint adhere better to slick surfaces and offer a translucent, transparent or opaque finish for windows, doors and decorative items. You can create the look of a stained glass window with applied leading, or simply add color to a plain vase for a quick and easy craft project.
Stained Glass Painting Techniques
Purchase stained glass paints to create a glass or acrylic project with the watery, translucent appearance of stained glass. The technique for creating a painted stained glass window is to place a pattern beneath the glass and trace the outlines with liquid leading or strips of self-adhesive leading. This will simulate the lead lines in real stained glass. Fill in between the lines with different colors of stained glass paint. You can apply the stained glass paint directly from the container, squeezing it onto the window vertically or horizontally. Swirl the paint to blend a single color and give it a watery effect, or comb it with a special tool to blend multiple colors. Keep a toothpick close by as the paint may have a tendency to bubble. You can break the bubbles with the toothpick or by tapping the backside of the glass.
Enamels
Apply enamel paints to glass plates or acrylic panels with an artist's brush, just the same as you would glass or acrylic craft paint. Professional enamel artists fire the paint into the glass, but you can find enamels that air dry and cure completely in 7 days at your local craft store. Place your pattern on the inside of a glass jar or the back of an acrylic panel and trace the outline onto the surface with a grease pencil, which you can remove easily with rubbing alcohol. You could also use the pattern as your guide without tracing the outline. Apply the enamel paint and let it dry. Remove the pattern. Follow the manufacturer's instructions for dry times before washing your painted object. Most enamel-painted objects are dishwasher safe and nontoxic, but don't serve food on them.
Glass Paint
Paint a glass plate you can eat off of with regular glass paint, a template and an artist's brush. Tape the template onto the surface of the plate and paint on the backside. The pattern will be visible through the glass, but the surface of the plate will be paint-free. Most glass paints suggest that you bake the painted object in a warm, 325-degree (Fahrenheit) oven for about 45 minutes to set the paint and make it dishwasher safe. Read and follow the manufacturer's instructions for baking your glass paint designs.
