Last night* was my first night of a three-session icon class. It is a Romanian Icon, which is reverse painting on glass. It was advertised as easy, as in, "if you can draw a crooked line, you can do this." Ahem. I beg to disagree. My table, which held me, a person fairly comfortable with painting fine details (all those ferns and ladybugs?), a fireman (my boy was so jealous!), a gallery manager, and a retiree, well, we all struggled. Everyone there struggled. I quit at this point- after two hours of work. The first step was to trace your design's outline ( I brought my paper copy of the Martyrs of Memphis) on glass with a sharpie. No problem. 15 minutes. Then came the painting the reverse of that outline on the glass. This is where the problems came in. Our instructor said that the paint needed to be "thin." No problem. I can do thin, I do thin with a 3-bristled brush and thinned black underglaze to make my ladybug details. It was too thin. The paint is supposed to be as thick as ink, thick enough to make a wall to hold in a layer of paint. Mine was watercolor thin. I think I spent 20 minutes working on getting the consistency right, then keeping it right (because the water evaporated quickly in the super-air-conditioned room).
I brought the piece home with me to work on after my sale. I won't have time this week- it will be a glazing, cleaning, and re-arranging fiesta at casa Bridgman, but we don't meet again until June 22, so hopefully I will have time next week. Interestingly, all of the other designs available were very detailed- mine is very simplified from the original icon. It is also the reverse image, but oh well. I'm not perfect. Neither is it.
*last night the dove came back- I've seen him around, but he was hanging out in the tree house WITH the boys. While they were hammering. Then eating from both of their hands. Pretty magical. But this is someone's pet, so we put an ad in the paper today. But man, oh, man, I'd like to hold the dove again!
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