In my last post, I showed you some finished windows I did at the Weston location of the Learning Zone. In this post, I thought I’d show you the process, from start to finish, for the Belmont Learning Zone location.
After talking to the owner of these daycare centers, Melissa Ananias, I took a few pictures of the exterior of the building.
Next, I did a rough sketch of the concept for Melissa:
See what I mean about ‘rough’?! Thankfully, Melissa knows my finished work! There were 3 sets of windows to work with.
To start, I sketched all the grass and flowers directly on the windows, with a water-based marker. (All work was done on the interior side of the glass). I then filled in everything with a glass primer, to give my paint layers a tooth to grab onto, and make the paint a little more permanent. Once the primer had dried, I went back over all my semi-permanent marker lines, with a black paint pen.
Here you can see the green semi-permanent marker, the frosted looking primer and the black paint pen lines. When working on glass windows, you have to remember to work in reverse, adding all the details first.
I painted all the grass first, then the flowers. For paint, I used a combination of latex interior house paints and craft paints. It took two coats to get a good coverage.
When dry, I sealed with a water-based sealer to protect it a little more.
This type of painting on windows is semi-permanent. If the windows are handled a lot, they will scratch and chip, even with the sealer. Most of the windows are out of reach from little hands, so should hold up quite well for a long time.
This Belmont location is right up the street from where I live. The other day when I was driving by and stopped at a red light, I quickly took this photo from inside my car. The happy flowers "growing" in all the windows really do grab your eye as you drive by!
