Fake Stained Glass

[Jonathan Fries]

We have a production coming up that needs a lot of stained glass. After searching online I found a clear film that I can put into my large format printer. Has anyone done anything like this before? I'm worried that the image might be too small and be over pix elated or that the colors might not be deep enough to read to the audience.

 

[jonliles]

Generally, I try to build my stain glass from scraps of gel. If you are doing large format printing, you are going to need an ultra Hi -Res graphic. What venue in town are you doing this for? I'm in Marietta.

 

[Jonathan Fries]

Generally, I try to build my stain glass from scraps of gel. If you are doing large format printing, you are going to need an ultra Hi -Res graphic. What venue in town are you doing this for? I'm in Marietta.

I'm the Production Manager at Actor's Express in West Midtown.

 

[jonliles]

Contact Chris Dills. He has some great ideas for this type of thing. He's currently working at The Atlanta Opera. Feel free to give him my name. He's a great guy and amazing scenic Artist. Same can be said for Nina Goock (like Nine-ah not NEE-na). she freelances all over the place. Both are on Facebook and subscribe to the Atlantathreatre Yahoo group.

It's been awhile since I've been to King Plow Arts Center. Nearest seat from Window? Size of Window?. Someting to consider, print the lead lines on the window and then hand fill with thinned acrylic paints. You may even want an "hire" an intern to trace the lead lines with black silicon. Each section/ piece of glass can then be flooded with your choice of colors.

 

[Van]

Depending on the color depth and design I like doing stained glass with Gel, as @jonliles stated, or with black latex caulk for the leading and Rosco Crystal Gel as the 'glass'. You can tint the crystal gel different color then paint it in-between the leaded areas. The nice thing about this is that the viscous nature of Crystal Gel allows for an inconsistent thickness which harkens to table formed <old> <wavy> Stained glass.
If you have a solvent based wide format printer and you can print on Acetate, that is a cheap and FAST way to go.
Lastly, if you have a standard ink-based plotter, you can use rolls of Baking parchment, or the thinnest roll paper you can find. Print your glass pattern on that then mount to plexiglass via spray-mount <don't use spray 77 or 90 for this it globs up too much>. This last option is really for windows that you want to appear translucent but not transparent.

 

[gafftapegreenia]

Hey Jonathan, good to see you here.

Other than echoing the above options, I know there are stained glass paints, but they come in rather small tubes that probably aren't cost effective. When I was working at Horizon and we did stained glass, we just did a thin coat of acrylic paint on plexi.

Cant you just make it lightings problem and have them shoot crushed dichroic gobos on the back of fluorescent light diffusion sheets? ;-)

 

[Taniith]

Rosco recently had a blog post about doing it the CrystalGel way that @Van mentioned: http://www.rosco.com/spectrum/index.php/2017/05/how-to-paint-stunning-realistic-stained-glass/

 

[kicknargel]

If you do try to print it:

In terms of resolution, you can find plenty of info on the web, but a little searching and personal experience says that with a viewing distance of at least 10', you can get away with ~30 dpi at full scale. So multiply that times the size in inches of the final print, and find a (properly licensed) file with at least that pixel size.

Or, if you create the artwork in Illustrator or another vector-based software, scalability is unlimited.

You'll probably still want to do the leading by hand, as light will still shine through the black parts of the print.

And of course, you'll definitely get a better result with a good scenic artist than with a print.