This is how to make stained glass!

Hello and welcome to my studio. My name is Derek Hunt and I'm a professional stained glass artist and today's tutorial is all about how to make a church stained glass window. The seven stages that you need to know in order to make a beautiful stained glass window from design through to installation starting right now. Step one is the design phase. I tend to work on paper to start with. I have the window opening whatever shape you are actually designing for laid out on a piece of paper. I then sketch in my key elements, the structure of the design, the key components that make up the design. Whether it's the tree of life or whether it's a saint or whatever that design idea is, it's sketched out on paper just with pencil first of all to get the basic structure and the key elements such as sketching elements that I want to include in the design. I end up with a design structure which looks something like this. It's just line work to start with. It is then colourised. I very often use water soluble pencils to colourise the design and I will create lots of different versions just experimenting and having fun creating coloured versions of that structure that I've decided that I like and eventually when I get to a colour palette that I'm happy with, I work it up to a final design that I can then submit to the client. That is submitted on a board, an A1 board like this which is then usually put forward to the church for permission. We in the UK have a planning permission called a faculty which you need to get in order to have your new work accepted by the church. Once it is accepted we're on to step two which is creating a cartoon. Here we are actually designing the window full size. We are drawing out a line drawing which is called a cartoon which then tells me exactly where each individual piece of glass is going to be positioned within the finished window. I've taken templates of the window and then I have drawn that out full size like this and this is a very precise drawing telling me exactly the finished size of the window and exactly where each individual piece of glass is going to go. Once we've done our cartoon we can start our glass cutting. Our glass cutting is the interesting phase where we are choosing all our coloured glass, cutting it to size on the cartoon and sticking it up on an easel prior to painting it. Once all the glass has been cut we can start the glass painting phase. This is the wonderful phase where you can actually make a lot of the final decisions for your design where you can experiment with different painting techniques, different weights of paint, different textures. You can fire it several times until you're happy with it. This is the phase where the design concept becomes a reality. That final phase is then put into the kiln and fired and I will go through that process several times until I get to the point where I'm happy with everything having been painted to my satisfaction. Step five leading and soldering. Once we have painted all of our glass we then lead it and it is leaded in the traditional way. This technique has not changed for centuries. From the 1100s onwards we have been making stained glass windows this same way. It is then soldered. I tend to use a gas soldering iron like this where we solder the joints where each individual piece of lead joins the next piece. We use tallow candle or a flux and blowpipe solder. Once it's all leaded together it is cemented. Now cementing is one of those dirty jobs that is not really great fun but it has to be done. We rub a cement mixture into the surface of the windows and then we brush that off and we clean it. It's a dirty old job but it's got to be done and it weatherproofs the windows and makes them solid. And now we have step seven the final stage in the process where we are fitting the stained glass window. This is where we get to see all of our hard work installed in its final position. We're taking out the existing glass and we're preparing the window. We're preparing all the ferramenta bars by painting them before we install our brand new stained glass window. We are using lime mortar which is a traditional lime mortar used in the UK when we're working with stone. It's kind to the stone and it allows the stonework to breathe. And here we have it the seven stages are completed and we now have our stained glass window installed in church. I hope you enjoyed today's video if you liked it leave a like leave comments and suggestions for future videos and please subscribe to the channel because I make new videos and inspiring videos on a very regular basis and I will see you in the next one.