Medieval Glass Painting: SCA Maunche for Music Painted and Fused Glasswork

One of my friends was getting his SCA Maunche in music. I asked if I could do it as I thought it would be really neat to do a piece of glass featuring music.

I started out by needing photo's of his instruments. I went over to his house and his wife got out his instruments and I took photos of them.

Then I needed a "piece of music". I went to Treasures of a Lost Art by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. By the way, an incredible book!!! The challenge was to find something that looked nice and was doable as glass painted art. On page 57 I found Two Martyr Saints in an Initial P. See below:

Although the letter P was beautiful, there was no way that it would lend itself to a period glass painting. So I redrew the P in the final sketch with a flower design.

The SCA maunche design I took from the SCA website.

And I mutual friend wrote the words for the scroll. The result is the sketch below.

NOTE: The blocks with the "X" mean that I was just going to put in colored glass....

Now begins the work. I figured that I would tackle the hardest part which was the music. I redid this piece several times with the black tracing ink before I was happy with it. Fortunately you can wash the paint off the glass and start over. Finally I was satisfied and fired the glass in my kiln

Next I worked on his various instruments. Doing the black tracing paint, firing the pieces and then doing the Bistre brown for shading.

I was going to try to paint the Maunche symbol but it would not have looked good in black and brown. Then I decided to do a fusing for the symbol. Technically not period but I think that glass might have accidently fused on occasion!

I did not want a lot of blank space around the piece so I put a leafy design on several of the pieces. The design is very similar to a German 13th century window replica that I had worked on several years ago.