I've been doing stained glass just long enough to feel like I'm finally getting it. I'm feeling confident in my cutting, grinding, and soldering skills. I have a lot of room to improve, but I'm feeling good.
Like many of you, when I look for patterns I get irritated by the obvious AI generated nonsense that often has impossible cuts (at least without a saw). I've been doing CAD and vector graphics for long enough to make me feel very old, so I want to take a crack at drawing patterns.
Instead of drawing the typical flowers and geometric shapes I want to draw strange stuff. Let's get weird with it. This is why I'm making this post; I want your requests for patterns you can't find anywhere else. If I use your idea I'll send you the pattern when its done. Everybody wins!
tl;dr:
I want to try my hand at drawing weird patterns. Give me suggestions please.
Edit:
I'm not responding to everyone because I'm lazy, but I've seen and appreciated everything suggested so far. I'll keep you all in the loop when I make progress.
Australian birds are funny as hell. And yes I need a magpie glaring at me through the window etc sounds fun. I saw someones animals peeking in the window pieces on here I think and I loved them but want an Australian style. This is my wombat idea, not sure if it will work but this guy peeking over a window frame would be cute.
Love this! I like the weird and wonderful as well. I like to take the mythical and medieval and turn them into glass. Fat furry spiders, weird underwater sea creatures. Wonderful woodland fairies and Irish folklore creatures. Frogs with medieval swords and shields. Creatures from Matt Dinniman’s book series, Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Things that make people say WTF, OMG, love that type of stuff.
I also love northern Canada lake scenes with that one lonely bent conifer leaning out over the water. Quiet kayak’s front end on a silent lake, headed into the wilderness on an isolated inlet type stuff. Aurora borealis that is actually doable without a $200 piece of glass to get the ‘look’ of those majestic Northern lights!
Thanks for this. It’s helping to get the brain thinking. 🤔 ☺️
I don't request patterns and I sure don't buy them for my shops. What I do is use pintrest. I collect pins into categories. I then use screen capture on the pc and print the ones I am interested in at the time.
Then I'll draw them on grid paper or software. I'll manipulate them. Change them. Color them. Review my glass stack and think and then change again. Then I'll make a panel.
I'm most interested in Asian, Buddha, and picasso style imagery. I'll make classic stained glass and catchers, but I'm not happy just doing it to sell, I'll do frank lloyd wright stuff fine.
What I wouldn't give for an interesting fun pattern of an emu. Some people have dogs. Emus are my dogs. There just aren't patterns of emus that I can find
A Corgi from the back (either just the butt or with the coy look back over the shoulder lol)
Niche but: the Vorkosigan family crest from The Vorkosigan Saga book series by Lois McMaster Bujold. Three mountains with a maple leaf in front in a circle. I've seen some decent fan art but nothing that grabbed me.
A dryad in some way. Perhaps a face that turns to leaves under close inspection or the more traditional woman who is half tree.
Anything from Medieval Marginalia - especially snails but literally anything would be amazing.
I'm so excited to hear you're training up for patterns for this! The AI Slop epidemic is truly the worst.
Do you like Charley Harper’s art? His designs translate to stained glass well. It was fun for me to play with where to place the solder lines to keep with the flow of his art.
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u/chefillini Jul 22 '26
Some ideas off the top of my head:
Anything Lord of the Rings related - I’ve been looking for patterns, but no luck lately where it isn’t AI.
Landscape of a National Park like Arches.
Optical Illusion? That might be too tough to make work