Stained Glass Guitar Skulls

Megan Geer-Alsop is one heck of a stained glass artist living in Topanga, CA. She makes a lot of different pieces including stained glass guitar ambient light sculptures. Here's are a couple that she did for Dia de Los Muertos.

These are too cool! The stained glass work looks terrific with it's smooth lines and colors. Add that to the fact that it's on a guitar and the cool factor just tripled. Megan has other instruments and shapes to share on her site. Thanks for tuning your axes to the key of Skull-A-Day, Megan!

Stained Glass Sugar Skull Candle Holders

Faith Spicer-Jenkins of Kent, England creates stained glass sugar skull candle holders.

I'm fond of stained glass when it's back lit, especially with candles. The colors radiate onto the surrounding surfaces. I'm sure the skull casts and eerie beautiful glow. I bet this would be more gorgeous in a dark room. You can see more of Faith's work on her FB Page and blog.

Stained Glass Tutorial

In this tutorial, I will walk you through the steps to creating a stain glass style design. This isn't an overly complex design, but you will need a few items in order to make the process go by smoothly (and to reduce the possibility of you wanting to pull your hair out by the end of it!). That being said, it's possible there is a simpler method out there for completing this look...This is just the way I went about things :)

You will need:

--Base/top coat

--Several different colored polishes (I used 7, but this is entirely up to you)

--A black polish, for outlining each color. I used a black nail art pen with a thin brush

--Acetone/polish remover to clean your brush between colors

--A surface to dab out polish (your palette, if you will)

--A small, thin brush used for intricate detail. Below is the brush I used

Apply your favorite base coat (I use OPI's Nail Envy). 

1. Begin creating your pattern using your black polish. 

2. Complete your black outline in anyway you'd like. I ended up repeating the same pattern on all of my nails (once you color in each section, you can't tell that they are the same). Don't worry about how precise or thick your line work is for this step. This is simply a layout for you to color in later. 

3. Dab out some (or all if you're a fast painter) onto your palette and make sure you have some acetone ready for cleaning your brush after each step. 

4. Choose your first color and carefully paint inside one of the sections you created in steps 1 & 2. 

5. Repeat this process using all of your colors. It's up to you how you place these. I decided to mix up each nail and tried to avoid using the same color in the same spot twice. 

6. Depending on how many sections you've created with your black pattern, you may have extra spaces to fill and not enough colors. In this case, you'll have to reuse a few of the colors. Just make sure you don't place the same colors directly next to each other. 

7-8. Once you've filled in all of your colors, your black line work is likely not very clean or defined. Go back over each line carefully with your black and redraw your lines. It's up to you how thick you want them to be. 

9-10. Once you've completed your final line work, wait a few minutes to ensure that your black has dried a sufficient amount and then apply your favorite top coat. If you apply your top coat too soon after steps 7 & 8, you'll end up with black streaks on your colors. 

And that's it! For more pictures of this finished product, check out this post. Let me know if you have any questions! 

Happy Polishing! :)

Stained Glass Inspired!

This design kept popping up in my head and for whatever reason I kept nudging it away to do something else. I finally gave into it and frankly, I don't know what took me so long to actually do it. This is probably one of my more intricate designs and I am really proud of how they turned out. This whole look probably took me around 2 hours to complete which I know is more than most people want to commit to doing their nails, but I am in love with it. I've been asked to do a tutorial for it and if there is any more interest I'll see if I can put something together.

Someone had mentioned that these sort of looked like turtle shells and I think they do lend themselves a bit to that ;)

Happy Polishing! :)