Stained Glass Look Paper Ornaments. Homemade Dimensional Paint Tutorial

Every year my 4-H club makes ornaments to decorate a tree for the parade of trees in our community.  This year we made paper ornaments that have the look of stained glass.  It's a challenge to come up with a project that small hands can make along with  a few older kids.  Plus we have to make enough to cover a tree with the addition of glass balls in a couple of hours time.  Challenge for sure!

First I found some Christmas ornament shapes online, printed them out and made some templates.

Then traced them onto watercolor paper.  I can't believe what a difference the paper makes!

Now, here's the great part!!  Add a bit of black paint to a partial bottle of white school glue and shake to mix well.  This will be your "leading"! Homemade dimensional paint for pennies! It works great! I'm sorry I can't find the link to where I saw this idea.

Then you just "pipe" the "leading" on like you were decorating a cake.

I didn't take a picture of the inside piping, but now you add some divisions any way you want so it will look like pieces of glass fused together.

I put the sheets in a low oven to speed the drying process.  This was harder than it looks for me as I don't have a super steady hand.  The kids could have done it, but we didn't have time for them to do this and get them dried and painted.  So I prepped all the pieces ahead of our meeting.

Then I chose some 4 and 5 letter words from this free AWESOME typeface, called South Rose. Thanks to Jessica from How About Orange for blogging about South Rose!

I resized the words and used carbon paper to transfer the word to the watercolor paper.

The words had to be big because the glue is not a fine line.  Some detail had to be left out.

I think if you used actual dimensional paint you could make your self a neat poster with this font on watercolor paper because you could have smaller words. 

Then after following the lines for soooooo long, I just wanted to squirt out paint/glue where ever I wanted!

So, I made myself a little Christmas tree.

And painted it too!  I even found a frame for it from my stash of frames. :)

Now, if all goes as planned, we will have a wood tree made out of lathe to hang these from....we'll see!

The kids really enjoyed making these!  It was neat to see how even in filling in with water colors, each kid had their own style especially noted in the intensity of the colors.

I think there is a LOT of potential for making your own dimensional paint on the fly at home.  Valentines with red added comes to mind first!

With gratitude this Thanksgiving Eve for you all who come by and read my blog....

I wish you a Blessed day tomorrow!!