GCB Process Part I
As a disabled person (I’m a full-time wheelchair-user), I think about movement a great deal, both in daily life and art. How do lines, shapes, colors, light, etc. move through a piece? How does movement build narrative? How will light move through glass in situ over the course of a day? Weather? Seasons?
Stained glass is a tricky medium in which to convey movement. It’s about as rigid a medium as you can find, not to mention finicky and fragile. While blown glass can be manipulated in its molten state to create beautiful sweeps and curves, stained glass starts as flat panes. Good thing I love a creative challenge!
I imagine Great Celestial Beasts as the darkness between stars and constellations. They’re creatures of endless transformation, and as such appear a bit differently to everyone, I think. Living with degenerative disability too is an ongoing process of transformation, sometimes in ways that feel overwhelmingly huge and terrifying. I have difficulty sleeping, so will often go outside and stargaze in the middle of the night (the colder the night, the better). This Beast appeared to me on one such long winter night, offering strength, encouragement, and a ferocity I didn’t know I needed. The whole time I worked on this window, I felt this Great Celestial Beast as a deeply positive, yet fierce guardian of sorts: a reminder of strength and transformative potential of dark nights.
Every piece I create—whether painting or stained glass—begins as quick, rough thumbnails.
My initial thumbnail in a tiny notebook in my swim-bag (always carry notebooks, you never know where ideas might meet you).
For this window, I envisioned a Great Celestial Beast hidden in the solder lines of a night sky full of stars. I wanted the sky to look almost black when unlit, then come to life in light.
I’m a regular lap-swimmer, and tend to imagine stained glass on the ceiling while I swim, often sketching thumbnails in the sauna or locker room after. I love the days when sunlight spills into my lane and I swim through rainbows. What joy! The flow and play of light in water inspires much of the movement and color in my stained glass.
I’ll sketch anywhere from 4 to 30+ thumbnails for a piece. In this case, I got the basic shapes fairly quickly, but it took me a while to work out the flow and movement. I knew I wanted it to look like all the sky was churning, the Beast a storm of movement in the center, but how exactly would all those shapes and lines work together? Eventually I settled on the Beast’s body circling around a central star, sky swirling around them. Circles are useful in both illustration and glass, as they loop the viewer’s eye in continuous movement, focusing the narrative and connecting all the elements of a piece.
More rough thumbnails trying to work out the Beast’s pose and flow of the sky.
Initially, I tried to incorporate silhouetted trees—evergreens—to induce a sort of forced perspective of looking up at the night sky from within a forest, and thus give a sense of place. One idea was to delineate the Beast’s shape with these silhouettes, but that muddled the flowing lines, making the piece too busy and confusing. The “perspective trees” were also scrapped due to size limitations; had I included them, the window would’ve roughly doubled in size.
A larger sketch (on toned gray paper with graphite and white charcoal). While I’d worked out most of the Beast’s pose, I was unsure what their tail might look like (I tried a seal-tail here, but ultimately decided against it). Here I also tried out the “perspective trees” idea, thinking the rigid evergreen lines might provide good contrast to the flowing sky/Beast, but it ended up being too busy and confusing.
The Beast’s exact form also varied a great deal between sketches as I tried to work out what they might look like. I imagine Great Celestial Beasts as the darkness between stars/constellations, so they appear a bit differently to everyone. Like many mythological beasts, I stole elements from various animals: the head of a wolf, feet of an owl, wings of a falcon, tail of a seal (above) or fox (in the final piece), and a spine of stars. I knew I wanted them to have a spine of stars, a star in their chest, and one gripped in their paw or jaws. Putting them back in the sky, perhaps? Or protecting them from the viewer?
I experimented with various styles as well. Stained glass lends itself well to highly stylized representations, so I leaned in to the idea of fur as armor shards, with ribs helping to show the curving, twisting body. This sort of angular style not only helped break the space up into smaller pieces (thus strengthening the glass), but also allowed me to visually bridge the gap between the sharp, angular stars and the flowing, organic lines of the sky, while suggesting that both combined to form this celestial body.
In the rough sketch above, I tried a Witcher-style wolf head, ornamented with stars, horns, and ear-wings. Ultimately this proved both too complex/busy and too static. The gaze was too direct and didn’t fit the narrative of an enormous being glimpsed briefly in a night sky full of movement.
When I paint, I often paint the face/head first. It feels like bringing the painting to life in a way, which then gives the rest of the painting direction and energy. This was no different. Once I settled on a sketch of the Beast’s head that conveyed the sense of elegance and strength I needed, I began to create the pattern.
Normally in stained glass, I’ll create the entire pattern before beginning the actual glass. This time, however, I decided to make the head first as a sort of test. This was my first major stained glass piece, so I wanted to give myself some flexibility to adjust the pattern as I went, which turned out to be a good thing. So I created both the pattern and glass in sections: sketching the pattern for the next bit, making the glass for that section (and soldering it together), and then creating the next section of pattern to fit with what I’d made. Normally, that’d be madness, but for this piece, with its thousands of tiny pieces, this method worked well for me. It allowed me to tackle this huge and complex window one small section at a time, keeping me from getting overwhelmed and letting me really dig in and enjoy the process for each bit.
Stained glass is always built with the right-side (texture) of the glass facing down, which makes the final glass a mirror image of the pattern. As you can see in the above, I changed the design of the front paw with the star to make it more dynamic and gripping. For the star, I created a normal star, then laid the curving claws on top, traced where they overlapped, and cut out those sections.
This test was also useful for me in deciding which glass I wanted to use, and how I wanted to use it. I found panes of dark blue wispy with burgundy and violet, deep ultramarine cathedral glass, and deep blue wispy with crimson. My original idea was to mix all three for a mosaic effect, but that felt too disorganized and messy. So this head was ultimately scrapped (and subsequently fought over by friends), and after finishing the rest of the Beast, I created a second head that better fit the colors and flow.