Stained Glass Coloring Pages
Welcome to my Stained Glass coloring pages section.
A stained glass window is made from lots of small pieces of colored glass held together by thin strips of lead, and the dark lines you see between the colors are that lead. The glass is colored while it's melted, so the color goes all the way through.
Jump to: Flowers | Birds | Autumn | Saints
Stained Glass Flowers
Stained Glass Birds
Stained Glass Autumn
Stained Glass Saints
Church windows are often filled with pictures of saints. Saint Cecilia is the patron saint of music, and Saint Lorenzo Ruiz was the first saint from the Philippines.
About Stained Glass:
A stained glass window is a picture made of light. When the sun shines through, the colors glow, and they shift as the day goes on, so the same window looks different at breakfast and at supper.
Glassmakers color the glass while it's melted by stirring in bits of metal. Cobalt makes blue, and a little gold makes a deep ruby red. The cooled glass is cut into pieces and fitted together like a puzzle, with strips of lead holding the edges. Faces and folds of clothing are painted on with dark paint and baked in a kiln so they never wash off. Those thick dark lines on every stained glass coloring page are the lead, and each space between them is a piece of glass.
The most famous stained glass is in churches. Chartres Cathedral in France still has many windows from the 1200s. Church windows told Bible stories and the lives of saints in pictures, which helped in a time when most people couldn't read. Saints like Cecilia are a favourite subject, and round "rose windows" can look like giant glass flowers.
In the late 1800s an American artist named Louis Comfort Tiffany made stained glass popular for homes too. He made a technique called copper foil famous. A thin strip of copper tape wraps the edge of each piece of glass instead of lead, so glass can curve around a lamp shade and tiny details like dragonflies and wisteria become possible. Tiffany lamps are still some of the best loved pieces of glass art.
Today stained glass is a hobby as well. Home crafters use the copper foil method to make small panels and the little suncatchers you hang in a window, and I'm a big fan of those. Sunlight comes through a tiny glass dragonfly and throws colored light across the floor, just like a cathedral window does, only smaller. Some people use glass paint on a plain window to get the same look without cutting any glass at all.
Kids can make their own stained glass with nothing fancier than tissue paper. Cut shapes out of a sheet of black paper, leaving a black frame, then stick scraps of colored tissue paper over the holes. The black paper does the job of the lead, and when you tape it to a window the sun glows through the tissue just like it does through real glass. A tissue paper butterfly or flower looks surprisingly like the real thing.