Faux Stained Glass - Oil Pastel Botanicals

Learn about stained glass, color theory and oil pastel techniques with this fun project!

VIDEO: This video walks you through the whole project. You can watch it instead of reading the blog, or use it as reference if you need help with a particular step.

Intro and History

This project was designed as a group artwork for one of my art classes to give them opportunities to practice their color theory and oil pastel skills. You can do it on your own, though! If you don't have a group or a class, I recommend making a smaller version with less window panes* so it doesn't take you as long.

*Each piece of paper is one "pane" of the window. It's easy to make a window with 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15 or 16 panes depending on the size of your class or the shape of your window.

TIP: If you are working as a group, line up your panes after each step to make sure you are happy with how it is looking! It is easy to make mistakes when working on lots of separate pieces of paper, but with lots of checking you should be able to fix them.

Materials you will need: printer paper, oil pastels, pencil, eraser, tissues, vegetable oil

Oil pastels work well for an artwork inspired by stained glass because they are incredibly vibrant, much like the colors of glass, and easy to blend.

In this project, each shape has two colors, a darker one around the edge, and a lighter one in the middle.

By blending the two colors in each shape, you get the impression of light shining through glass.

Step 1: The sketch

(printer paper, pencil, eraser, references)

Before you start, you need to decide on how many panes your window will have. I would recommend 4 panes if you are doing it by yourself, and one or two panes each if you are doing it in a group. Make sure you can lay out all the pages you want to use into a window shape.

You can make your stained glass as big or as small as you like by using more or less pieces of paper to adapt the project to a group or individual.

I have made ones with my class that are 3x5 for a total of 15 panes, but for my demonstration I am making a 2x3 window since I'm working by myself and anything more than six panes would take me a long time.

First gather your references. I would encourage you to go outside and photograph plants with cool leaf shapes, or even bring samples of plants inside to look at while you draw.

Using references adds interest and ideas, and helps improve the detail of your drawings. I love plants because there is no "wrong" shape for a plant, but you could definitely do a window with household objects, or clothes, or anything that inspires you!

Next, draw 1-2 plant shapes on each page. Try to draw your shapes big and simple using pencil. Avoid shapes smaller than a quarter, because you will have trouble controlling your oil pastels at that size.

Take inspiration from your references, but don't try to draw them exactly. Use the shapes you see, but make them bigger and smoother.

If you are doing this as a group, have each person draw on their own page(s) only for now.

Next, line up your panes and "connect" them by extending leaf shapes over two or more pages, or adding extra shapes that go across more than one pane.

If you are doing this as a group project, work together to connect your page with those next to it, so everyone is happy with how the whole thing looks.

This helps unify the final artwork rather than just looking like individual artworks hung next to each other.

While they are still lined up, draw curving lines across any big background spaces that remain to break them up into smaller shapes. This just makes your window panes more fun to color.

Finally, take a picture of your assembled window so it's easy to put it back together the right way!

Step 2: Coloring in

(oil pastels, scrap paper to rest your hand on)

Before you start coloring, decide on a color scheme for your window. Be consistent across all your window panes!

I particularly like dividing my pastels into "warm" colors and "cool" colors. Warm colors are things like red, orange, and yellow, while cool colors are blues, greens and purples.

By using one group of colors for your objects, and another for your background, it will be easy for viewers to tell what is what. In my artwork I used "warm" for objects and "cool" for background, but you could definitely do it the other way around.

Now color each shape in your window pane, starting with foreground shapes and then moving to background shapes. Leave a small gap at edges of shapes so you can still see your sketch lines.

For each shape use a darker color around the edges, and then color the middle with a lighter color, overlapping the two slightly. Your coloring does not have to be perfect. It will all get fixed in our next step.

TIP: Similar colors will blend better than very different colors! For example, green mixes better with blue than with purple, even though they are both "cool" colors. (You can see this in the example photo!)

Step 3: Blending

(finger, small container of vegetable oil, tissues)

Blending oil pastels can be done lots of ways, but I think the easiest is just to use your finger.

Rub lightly on the center of each shape in circular or back and forth motions. As the oil pastels smooth under your finger, slowly work outwards until the whole shape is smooth and blended.

TIP: Always blend from light to dark so you don't smudge your light areas.

If you are using your finger to blend, it will quickly get messy. Always use a clean finger to blend each new shape. You can switch fingers, or just clean your finger each time.

Dip dirty fingers into your container of oil, and they should wipe off easily with a bit of tissue. Oil pastels use oil as a base for their color, so the vegetable oil acts as a solvent, making it easy to wipe your fingers clean.

(You can also use various oils to blend your pastels, but I wouldn't recommend it with this project because printer paper is so thin the oil might damage it.)

Step 4: Outlines

(black oil pastel)

Now that your pane is blended, go over all your sketch lines in black oil pastel. This is the "grout" between your glass shapes.

Try to cover any gaps you left between shapes.

You should aim to keep the thickness of the black lines pretty consistent across the whole window, so compare notes if you are working as a group!

A nice detail once you've drawn your outlines is to look for any corners between two black lines, and round them out by drawing a slight curve over the corner. This helps the black lines look more like grout between pieces of glass.

Finally, outline the whole page with a black outline, rounding out the corners of the page and any other corners this creates.

TIP: Be very careful not to smudge your black over everything when you get to this stage! It's hard to fix.

Step 5: Combining

Once you've done steps 1-4 for all the window panes you made in step 1, lay them out next to each other in the correct order.

Make sure things line up, and that line thicknesses match across the whole thing. Do any final touchups you need to.

You're done! Hang your piece with sticky stuff or double-sided tape on a wall, leaving no space between the window panes.

Enjoy your stained glass window!

NOTE:

Now that I have done this winter-inspired one, I want to do ones for the other three seasons. I'm going to wait for each season to come, and then collect seasonal references, but eventually I hope to make this a series of botanical stained glass windows, and I'll certainly add pictures of them here if I do.

For now, I hope you enjoy this project! Make it your own, and feel free to send me pictures of your final projects.

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