Gum Arabic | The Questions of Glass Painting

Mix great paint to start with

A few months ago, a student from Illuminate, mixing paint for the first time, accidentally made “soup”.

That is, runny paint.

So runny it was uncontrollable – impossible to work with.

“Help! What shall I do?” they asked.

And we replied. Because that’s how we work inside our online courses: we help you solve your problems.

Not just while the course lasts.

Also afterwards.

Now, if this happens to you – that you accidentally make soup: sloppy, runny paint – in brief the options are:

Add more powder, or
Add more gum.

But, suspecting from our student’s words that the answer was “more gum”, we made a short film just for them to give them confidence.

After all, you might think, if you have runny paint to start with, how can you thicken it by adding liquid gum?

This film you’re about to watch is not the film we made for our student.

It’s a new film.

We’ve given it more context.

It’s all part of the glass painter’s method – the method which we’re thrilled to share with you, because learning how to paint stained glass is such a wonderful experience.

It’s why we wrote a book.

The Glass Painter’s Method, Book 1 is ready.

We prefer liquid: here’s why

Gum Arabic isn’t essential. (Patrick Reyntiens, for example, barely uses it at all.) It’s just that, without it, our dried, unfired paint would be extremely fragile.

Also, we would not be able to shade and matt as we want to – that is, all in one firing, including oil-based paint on top.

Now stained glass painting stockists mainly stock gum Arabic in powdered form.

But I prefer the liquid, and here is why:

Liquid is far easier to mix in than powder when you first prepare your basic lump.

When you need (as you sometimes will) to adjust the adhesive strength of your paint, you’ll again see that liquid gum Arabic is far easier to mix than powder.

To use powder, it’s best to mix it first with – water … Now when you buy liquid, you know the adhesive strength is evenly distributed throughout the solution (which it’s difficult for you to know when you mix it up yourself), so that’s one more problem taken care of for you.

Liquid gum Arabic is the same medium that water-colour painters use.

So just find a good supplier of traditional art materials, and they will help you.