Medieval Glass Painting: SCA Pelican Award August 2015

A dear friend and "sis" was awarded her SCA Pelican award in August 2015. I was honored to do a glass scroll for her. The SCA Pelican award is the highest service award in the SCA. The pelican is the only animal that will prick her breast and feed her blood to her young if they are hungary.

So I needed a pelican design. I searched the internet and found this neat picture to base my glass on. This scroll also needed her "Arms' which were unusual featuring a scorpion. Below is the sketch that I based my glass work on. It should be noted that several of the photo's in this blog show her scorpion facing the wrong direction. I had drawing it incorrectly at first. However a good friend noticed it and told me. Thankfully I got it changed! The finished piece at the end was done in the correct orientation.

I decided to work on the hardest part first...the pelican. First I fused some red glass chips onto the glass. Then I used black tracing paint to do the outline. I also used it to create the illusion of came work on the piece.

Then I used bistre brown to do shading

After the brown was fired in the kiln it came out like this:

Then I started work on the "Arms". The pics below show the process that I used before I realized that I had done it in the wrong direction. I forgot to take pictures of it when I redid it.

First I painted on the black trace lines

Then I departed from period technique and used a red fusable paint for the body,

I also decided to do the top part as a fusable piece also

The words for the scroll were done as a decal and then fused onto glass. Then a clear fusable glass was put over it to preserve it.

Below are the three pcs put against the sketch - note that the scorpion is now going in the right direction!