Chapter VIII

The Second Painting--Disappointment with Fired Work--A False
Remedy--A Useful Tool--The Needle--A Resource of Desperation--The
Middle Course--Use of the Finger--The Second Painting--Procedure.

And when you have looked at it, as I said just now you should do, your first thought will be a wish that you had never been born. For no one, I suppose, ever took his first batch of painted glass out of the kiln without disappointment and without wondering what use there is in such an art. For the painting when it went in was grey, and silvery, and sharp, and crisp, and firm, and brilliant. Now all is altered; all the relations of light and shade are altered; the sharpness of every brush-mark is gone, and everything is not only "washed out" to half its depth, but blurred at that. Even if you could get it, by a second painting, to look exactly as it was at first, you think: "What a waste of life! I thought I had done! It was _right_ as it was; I was pleased so far; but now I am tired of the thing; I don't want to be doing it all over again."

Well, my dear reader, I cannot tell you a remedy for this state of things--it is one of the conditions of the craft; you must find by experience what pigment, and what glass, and what style of using them, and what amount of fire give the least of these disappointing results, and then make the best of it; and make up your mind to do without certain effects in glass, which you find are unattainable.

There is, however, one remedy which I suppose all glass-painters try, but eventually discard. I suppose we have all passed through the stage of working very dark, to allow for the firing-off; and I want to say a word of warning which may prevent many heartaches in this matter. I having passed through them all, there is no reason why others should. Now mark very carefully what follows, for it is difficult to explain, and you cannot afford to let the sense slip by you.

I told you that a film left untouched would always come out as a black patch against work that was pierced with the scrub, however slightly.

Now, herein lies the difficulty of working with a very thick matt; for if it is thick enough on the cheek and brow of a face to give strong modelling when fired, _then whenever it has passed over the previous outline-painting, for example, in the eyes, mouth, nostrils, &c., you will find that the two together have become too thick for the scrub to move._

Now you do not need, as an artist, to be told that it is fatal to allow _any_ part of your painting to be thus beyond your control; to be obliged to say, "It's too dark, but unfortunately I have no tools that will lighten it--it will not yield to the scrub."

However, a certain amount can be done in this direction by using, on the shadows that are _just_ too strong for the scrub, a tool made by grinding down on sandpaper a large hog-hair brush, and, of these, what are called stencil-brushes are as good as any (fig. 45).

You do not use this by dragging it over the glass as you drag a scrub, but by _pricking_ the whole of the surface which you wish to lighten. This will make little pinholes all over it, which will be sufficient to let the patch of shadow gently down to the level of the surrounding lighter modelling, and will prevent your dark shadows looking like actual "patches," as we described them doing a little way back.

Further than this you cannot go: for I cannot at all see how the next process I am to describe can be a good one, though I once thought, as I suppose most do, that it would really solve the difficulty. What I allude to is the use of the needle.

_Of Work Etched out with a Needle._--The needle is a very good and useful tool for stained glass, in certain operations, but I am now to speak of it as being used over whole areas _as a substitute for the scrub, in order to deal with a matt too dense for the scrub to penetrate._

The needle will, to be sure, remove such a matt; that is to say, will remove lines out of it, quite clear and sharp, and this, too, out of a matt so dense, that what remains does not fire away much in the kiln. Here is a tempting thing then! to have one's work unchanged by the fire! And if you could achieve this without changing the character of the work for the worse, no doubt this method would be a very fine thing. But let me trace it step by step and try to describe what happens.

You have painted your outline and you put a very heavy matt over it.

Peril No. 1.--If your matt is so dense that it will not _fire off_, it must very nearly approach the point of density at which it will _fry_. How then about the portions of it which have been painted on, as I have said, over _another_ layer of pigment in the shape of the _outline_? Here is a _danger_. But even supposing that all is safe, and that you have just stopped short of the danger point. You have now your dense, rich, brown matt, with the outline just showing through it. Proceed to model it with the needle. The first stroke will really frighten you; for a flash of silver light will spring along after the point of the needle, so dazzling in contrast to the extreme dark of the matt that it looks as if the plate had been cut in two, while the matt beside it becomes pitch-black by contrast. Well, you go on, and by putting more strokes, and reducing the surrounding darkness generally, you get the drawing to look grey--but you get it to look like a grey _pen-drawing_ or _etching_, not like a painting at all. We will suppose that this seems to you no disadvantage (though I must say, at once, that I think it a very great one); but now you come to the deep shadows; and these, I need hardly say, cut themselves out, more than ever, like dark patches or blots, in the manner already spoken of. You try pricking it with the brush I have described for that operation, and it will not do it; then you resort to the needle itself, and you are startled at the little, hard, glittering specks that come jumping out of the black shadow at each touch. You get a finer needle, and then you sharpen even that on the hone; and perhaps then, by pricking gingerly round the edges of the shadows, you may get the drawing and modelling to melt together fairly well. But beware! for if there is one dot of light too many, the expression of the head goes to the winds. Let us say that such a thing occurs; you have pricked one pinhole too many round the corner of the mouth.

What can you do?

You take your tracing-brush and try to mend it with a touch of pigment; and so on, and so on; till you timidly say (feeling as if you had been walking among egg-shells for the last hour), "Well, I _think_ it will _do_, and I daren't touch it any more." And supposing by these means you get a head that looks really what you wanted; the work is all what glass-painters call "rotten"; liable to flake off at the least touch; isolated bits of thick crust, cut sheer out from each other, with clear glass between.

In short, the thing is a niggling and botching sort of process to my mind, and I hope that the above description is sufficiently life-like to show that I have really given it a good trial myself--with, as a result, the conclusion certainly strongly borne home to me, that the delight of having one's work unchanged by the fire is too dearly purchased at the cost of it.

_How to get the greatest degree of Strength into your Painting without Danger._--Short of using a needle then, and a matt that will only yield to that instrument, I would advise, if you want the work strong, that you should paint the matt so that it will just yield, and only just, and that with difficulty, to the scrub; and, before you use this tool, just pass the finger, lightly, backwards and forwards over the matted surface. This will take out a shimmer of light here and there, according to the inequalities of the texture in the glass itself; the first touches of the scrub will not then look so startling and hard as if taken out of the dead, even matt; and also this rubbing of the finger across the surface seems to make the matt yield more easily to the tool. The dust remaining on the surface perhaps helps this; anyhow, this is as far as you can go on the side of strength in the work. You can of course "back" the work, that is, paint on the back as well as the front--a mere film at the back; but this is a method of a rather doubtful nature. The pigment on the back does not fire equally well with that on the front, and when the window is in its place, that side will be, you must bear in mind, exposed to the weather.

I have spoken incidentally of rubbing the glass with the finger as a part of painting; but the practice can be carried further and used more generally than I have yet said: the little "pits" and markings on the surface of the glass, which I mentioned when I spoke of the "right and wrong sides" of the material, can be drawn into the service of the window sometimes with very happy effect. Being treated with matt and then rubbed with the finger, they often produce very charming varieties of texture on the glass, which the painter will find many ways of making useful.

_Of the Second Painting of Glass after it has been Fired._--So far we have only spoken of the appearance of work after its first fire, and its influence upon choice of method for _first painting_; but there is of course the resource which is the proper subject of this chapter, namely, the second painting.

Very small work can be done with one fire; but only very skilful painters can get work, on any large scale, strong enough for one fire to serve, and that only with the use of backing. Of course if very faint tones of shadow satisfy you, the work can be done with one fire; but if it is well fired it must almost of necessity be pale. Some people like it so--it is a matter of taste, and there can be no pronouncement made about it; but if you wish your work to look strong in light and shade--stronger than one painting will make it--I advise you, when the work comes back from the fire and is waxed up for the second time (which, in any case, it assuredly should be, if only for your judgment upon it), to proceed as follows.

First, with a tracing-brush, go over all the lines and outlined shadows that seem too weak, and then, when these touches are quite dry, pass a thin matt over the whole, and with stippling-brushes of various sizes, stipple it nearly all away while wet. You will only have about five minutes in which to deal with any one piece of glass in this way, and in the case of a head, for example, it needs a skilful hand to complete it in that short space of time. The best plan is to make several "shots" at it; if you do not hit the mark the first time, you may the second or the third. I said "stipple it nearly all away"; but the amount left must be a matter of taste; nevertheless, you must note that if you do not remove enough to make the work look "silvery," it is in danger of looking "muddy." All the ordinary resources of the painter's art may be brought in here: retouching into the half-dry second matt, dabbing with the finger--in short, all that might be done if the thing were a water-colour or an oil-painting; but it is quite useless to attempt to describe these deftnesses of hand in words: you may use any and every method of modifying the light and shade that occurs to you.