STAINED GLASS TUTORIAL

I did my first designs by opening my stained glass pattern in PSP and clicking on colors/grey scale. Then I increased color depth to 16 million colors. I have since learned of a technique for getting nice crisp blacks and whites which might work better. After clicking grey scale, click colors/negative image, color/adjust brightness contrast and adjust the sliders until you have a black background with nice crisp white lines. You can then click colors/negative image again, and hopefully you will have a nice white background with nice clear black lines. (I haven't tried this tecnique on stained glass yet, but it should work).

The next thing I did was to select the black part with the magic wand, tolerance 100. Then I flood filled, solid color black to darken all the lines. (Hopefully, you won't have to do this with the negative image technique).

(another thing I have been doing since I first wrote this tutorial and made my first sets, is to select all the black lines and apply Blade Pro to them. There are many presets you can use to get different effects, just experiment until you see smething you like).

Then I decided what colors I wanted my stained glass to be. I chose a background color and slid the slider down until it was a really dark shade. Then I chose the same foreground color and slid the slider until it was a really light shade.

Next select a section you want to be in that color with your wand. Click the paint can/sunburst gradient/options/ and make sure the inside is the lightest color, if it isn't click the arrows to reverse the background and foreground colors.

Now you can fill the section you selected. You have to do each section individually if you want it to look right. If you select more than one section at a time, it won't shade right. You can see this by comparing my first stained glass design with the others.

Just keep doing this with the colors you want, it's easy!

Something else I started doing early on, but after I wrote this tutorial is to make a seamless tile from real stained glass and flood fill each section with real glass. I love this tecnique, and most of my designs were made in this way. I even made a whole background on one of my sets that way, you can see it by clicking on the link below, then clicking on the Christmas Angel.

These designs are taken from the book Victorian Stained Glass Pattern Book by Ed Sibbett Jr. which is part of Dover Publication's Pictorial Archives Series.