See the rest of this series here.

This week Basic Drawing met for the fifth time and Stained Glass met for the fourth time. Here’s where my stained glass panel is so far:

The pattern paper is on top of the magenta and brown pieces, and the green (top row center) looks black in this picture, so you’ll just have to imagine those colors for now. I think the colors we found were perfect, though — I had a lot of help from fellow stained-glass student Tiffany in finding all the colors I needed for my piece, which was quite a feat. As Jimmy, the instructor, predicted, finding magenta was pretty much impossible, but we found something very close. And check out the cool brown streaky glass we found:

Nicknamed “root beer glass” on the label, this is the same kind of glass that Jimmy suggested when I told him I was looking for something wood-ish for the outside of the TV. It looks even cooler in person. (A full list of the glass I’m using is at the end of this post, along with more pictures of my class at work.)

As you can see, I’m mostly done with cutting out the pieces, so next week I expect to finish that and I’ll probably start the grinding process.

We’re also making progress in Basic Drawing, where our instructor, George, kept us working on the still life from last week. He spends class coming around to each of our easels and showing us fixes as we try to perfect this drawing. He had me move and adjust the shapes a little and make my lines stronger, straighter, and rounder (in the case of the sphere). Here’s a before-and-after of my paper from class — you can see the cube got smaller and I tweaked the position of the pyramid:

I’ll have more to share next week!

In case you’re curious, here are Spectrum product numbers for the different glass I’m using:

• Gray: 180.8RR
• Red: 151W
• Green: 125W
• Turquoise: 833.1W
• Mauve: 140.8W
• Yellow: 161RR
• Black: 1009
• Brown/Gold Streaky: 411.15

— George