Scholarships available for my September 2021 workshops

If you’re interested in taking a workshop with me there’s still plenty of time to apply for a scholarship from the American Glass Guild.  Their deadline is August 30th 2021. You will need to select a workshop (with me or another stained glass instructor) as part of your application. Those who have already signed up for one of my September 2021 workshops are eligible to apply. International applicants are also welcome. Here’s my schedule of Fall 2021 stained glass workshops for beginners, stained glass professionals and artists in any media who might wish to attend. And here’s the direct link to an online application for the American Glass Guild’s James C. Whitney scholarships for 2021.

It was once feared that stained glass would become ‘a lost art’ but the tide has turned in recent years. Thank goodness! Younger artists are taking an interest, many with the support of two US organizations that work tirelessly to keep stained glass alive and thriving.

The Stained Glass Association of America (SGAA) is a vital community of stained glass artists, artisans and aficionados of stained glass. The American Glass Guild (AGG) is a nationwide group of equally dedicated independent artists and professionals. Both organizations encourage and promote the creation of new work and the conservation of stained glass. Both have also, for 13 years now, generously supported my workshops with tuition scholarships. Please support them if you can.

Donate to the American Guild Guild

Donate to the Stained Glass Association of America

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  glasspainting workshop in progress

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  design workshop

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  glasspainting workshop in progress

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  Karen Deets with the panel she designed, cut and painted during workshops

If you have questions please send me a message via my website. I spend long days in my studio and often forget all about my social media.

You may also explore my blog for hundreds of photos and articles about stained glass; watch short video clips of me glasspainting and discussing stained glass design; enjoy a 13 minute video of my entire process and learn more about me by listening to this 56 minute interview with Shawn Waggonner from her podcast Talking Our Your Glass.

Fall 2021 Stained Glass Workshops

Hurrah! We are beginning to lift our Covid-19 restrictions in Vermont. So if you’ve been waiting to take a design or glasspainting workshop with me you may. At last!

Hands-on, in-person, 5-day stained glass workshops will start September 20th 2021.

Right before the pandemic I created a new curriculum, a series of three stand-alone 5-day workshops. Maximum 6 people per workshop. Suitable for all skill levels with plenty of one-on-one tuition and playful group exercises to counteract any self-doubt or artistic insecurity.

Here’s the schedule. Workshops begin on September 20th 2021 with an introduction to glasspainting workshop followed by a stained glass design workshop and an advanced glasspainting workshop. Those who want to learn glasspainting and design in a single trip to Vermont may sign up for two or three adjacent workshops.  More information here.

Instruction includes Powerpoint presentations, technical demonstration, hands-on group exercises and individual projects. I teach practical skills and repeatable, step-by-step processes that are difficult to learn online or figure out on your own. You can learn how to mix slow-drying glasspaints to optimum viscosity for hand-writing, simple printmaking, wet scraffito and elegant, fluid brushwork; how to paint faux textures like stone, wood, feathers and fabric; and how to design a painted stained glass window from your own reference material.

Tuition costs $860 for each 5-day workshop and includes lunch and materials. Go to coombscriddle.com for a schedule, workshop descriptions, and general information on location, hours, scholarships, accommodations and more.  If you have questions, shoot me an email. Prefer to chat? Email me your mobile number and we’ll use text to schedule a phone call.

Why do I teach stained glass? In the midst of a glasspainting demo I gave in my last workshop one student said, I just learned more in 5 minutes that I did in 3 years of trying to figure it out on my own! Read this post about craftsmanship. Tip: there are some things that just cannot be learned from YouTube! Having said that, you may indeed watch videos of my beautifully responsive glasspainting mixture in action or read the story of my proprietary glasspainting recipe to get an idea. And if you’re wondering what it’s like here in Vermont, where workshops take place, watch the 11-minute video of me painting a stained glass window in my studio.

Lastly, if you’re curious about what drives me as an artist, listen to this interview about my life’s work in stained glass and how I transitioned to the mathematical work I’ve been doing in recent years. My resume in 57-minutes!  Many thanks to interviewer Shawn Waggonner. She really got me to open up!

The stained glass easel; why?

In the process of making stained glass there are two stages where the glass is easeled up against the daylight. First, when selecting glass, then later, when glasspainting. Easeling glass is time-consuming and thus expensive, so why do this?

Here’s my current work for All Saints Chapel at Carroll College in Helena Montana. Note how the opalescent glasses change at night/dusk. This is an effect that can only be estimated, whether on light table or easel, because my north-facing easel does not precisely mimic the light in Montana. The easel does, however, take out a lot of the guesswork.

 

 

Check a few older posts if you want to find out more about how and why glass is fixed to the easel, and watch the embedded video links. Stage one, selecting glass for colour, transparency/opacity and texture the English way, by fixing it to the clear glass easel plate with Plasticene; about choosing colour for a landscape window with figures; using beeswax and rosin (which fires off later in the kiln) in the process of  waxing up (fixing painted, fired  glass onto the easel for further layers of glasspaint); and details of a specific wet-matte technique that may be achieved with my https://coombscriddle.wordpress.com/2015/06/22/spreading-the-word-worldwide/proprietory propylene glycol mixture.

2016 workshops

This year, I am offering week-long design and glasspainting workshops in June; 3-hour Saturday Afternoon Intensives; and a 10 week series of evening classes beginning March 10th. All at my studio in Vermont. Here’s the schedule. Application deadlines for American Glass Guild and Stained Glass Associate of America scholarships are Feb 28th and April 13th respectively.

 

Snow in April

I must be the only person in Vermont who is happy to still have snow in April. It has provided me with the best possible backdrop for selecting coloured glass. The window is almost cut, and the snow, right on cue, has almost disappeared.

The picture so far – my garden…

… and the window, taken as it was getting dark.

I will post a better photo in a day or so when it’s totally finished. Then I’ll be moving into the glasspainting stage. But before I do I’d like to recommend a couple of books and sites about colour.

Understanding colour is pretty crucial because a stained glass window is basically a huge collage – a combination of pre-determined individual colours. It’s not like mixing paint from tubes where there are numberless options available. To complicate things, every time you add a new piece of glass it affects all those around it. It’s not practical to keep changing your mind (though I do this far more often than I’d like), but on the other hand, I really do want the window to read as a unified scene.

I know only too well the limitations of the medium. As I’m choosing glass I am constantly imagining how the window will look when it’s painted. I stay mindful of the fact that I can make colours appear darker with paint, but I cannot change the hue (the actual colour), the saturation/intensity (how clean or muted it is), or make the glass look lighter. And then there’s that annoying tendency for adjacent colours tend to interfere with one another, sometimes quite a lot.

I remember what an eye opener it was to learn about colour in art school. One memorable exercise from my first year at Edinburgh College of Art was painting a still life (objects on a table) all in the same tone/value. Imagine, the red apple had to be painted pink, and the grapefruit, mustard-coloured. If you screwed up your eyes and looked through your eyelashes your painting was supposed to look coloured but without definition between different objects. It was quite a challenge, but wonderful training.

Music provides a good analogy for colour: some people are tone deaf, a few have perfect pitch, most are somewhere in between. It’s the same with colour. Some can perceive fine and subtle differences between colours, some cannot, and some people are colour blind. In both cases we can learn how to perceive or reproduce notes and colours more accurately through training.

I found this brief, neat explanation of colour theory and descriptions of some of the exercises we learned in the stained glass department at Swansea College of Art, like contrast and dominance, and figure-ground relationships. I read the famous books, “Interaction of Color” by Josef Albers and “Elements of Colour” by Johannes Itten from cover to cover, and remember how exciting it was to perceive coloured after-images for the first time. If you’re not familiar with Itten’s theories you can read more here.