about those painted beads…painting on glass with enamels

Hi everyone. I’m back from the dead. Remember a month or two ago when I was talking about Bronwen Heilman style painted beads? I was really into them because they allowed me to incorporate other people’s artwork into my stuff. I found that particular medium extremely interesting. Other artists found it interesting as well but the general public, not so much.

Since I’m not independently wealthy, how I spend my time is directly related to what people are or are not buying from me so at the end of December I had to shelve the painted bead thing and get back to my regular bead line up. Much like the boro squids I worked on last summer, I learned a lot from trying this new medium–information that will probably be lost if I don’t say something about it. This info could be useful to you if you ever want to paint beads some day so here it is:

I’ll use my pal Partick’s painting to refresh your memory about this process: What’s going on here is he is painting with a mixture of enamels and oil a tiny painting in reverse on a piece of glass. First you draw a black outline and fire it so it is permanent. Then you paint the colors inside the outline and fire that. Then you paint white over all the colored areas and you fire that.

Then I take that painting and wrap it around a cylindrical bead like so:

One very time consuming part about the painting end of this process is the amount of time you spend scraping off dry paint that goes outside your outlines. Keep that in mind when choosing a design. It’s much harder to paint within long, skinny lines so you know that employing a design with a lot of skinny lines is going to mean a lot of clean up time.

Patrick is a detail freak so he didn’t mind all the work that went into this painting. In fact, I think he liked it. Other folks might find working with a design with fewer, or perhaps just differently placed outlines less insanity-provoking. Like, say, a martini:

Of course, the crane bead kicks the martini bead’s ass so you get out of this process what you put into it. I wouldn’t start out with a skinny line design, but that’s just me.

One element of this process with which I was pleasantly surprised is how easy it is to encase beads with sheet glass. Initially, I was freaking out at having to put those little paintings in the flame after working on them for so long. But it’s not that hard! I had very few bubbles and no breakage after I followed the instructions in Heilman’s book.

Start out with a very uniform, smooth cylinder-shaped bead. Do not preheat the sheet glass with your painting on it. Keep it at room temperature, pick it up with a tweezers and heat one end all the way up and down, adhere that end to your cylinder, keep the flame moving back and forth lengthwise on the glass as you slowly rotate it backwards.

With some practice the glass should just melt right on there. Issues with having the design line up at the seam can be resolved mostly by strategic design planning-locating it centrally within the sheet. Any background lines should be placed at the same height on either side so they meet when it goes around. I almost always have a coat of transparent colored glass over the outside of my cylinder. It seems to help the sheet to blend into the background.

But how, how you may be asking, do you figure out how long your sheet glass needs to be to go around a bead? I measured the circumference of a dime by rolling one along my little bead measuring calliper. A dime’s circumference is huge– 2.25 inches or so. That’s plenty of room for a drawing. I made all of my beads about the same circumference as a dime and cut my sheet to 2.25 inches long to start out.

The finished sizes of those beads were huge but after a while I was able to eyeball smaller sizes by winding beads and cutting sheet in relation to a dime–a little smaller or a lot smaller, depending. Fitting paintings onto a bead also turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. Not all of mine were perfect but that dime thing was really helpful for measuring.

Those are my bead painting tips. I hope you enjoyed them.