This is part 1 of a 3 part series, it's uh, it's a long'n.
We were out at dinner for Donny's bachelor party. This was the saturday after I had posted the story about my first stained glass window. I brought up the topic of the window as I still found it quite funny and B commented that I should check out some video of a guy making a stained glass window of naked woman. It somehow had never occurred to me that this would be something other people did, but I feel like that must be a rule 34 corollary. "For any medium that exists which can be used to create imagery, it has been used to create imagery of an erotic/pornographic nature."
10,000 hours of googling later I found there was a bit of it out there. The biggest purveyor was this place in canada. I won't link to their site and here's why. The incomparable Neil Gaiman has a policy when working on a book, or even just thinking about working on a book, that he won't read any books that he thinks tell a similar story. His logic is that he doesn't want his work to be even subconsciously influenced by someone else's interpretation. I like that idea quite a bit and while it's not something I do, it's good here that I didn't have anyone else's influence because it might have held me to a lower standard. What I'm saying is that all the erotic stained glass out there is fucking terrible. This website in particular had a number of pieces with $500 price tags. I was in shock by this so I e-mailed their customer support:
TO: (removed)
FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com
SUBJECT: question
So I was going through your available erotic stained glass and was just curious, do you actually sell these?
TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com
FROM: (removed)
SUBJECT: RE: question
Thanks for writing in. Yes all the work there is available for sale, was there one that interested you?
TO: (removed)
FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com
SUBJECT: RE: RE: question
I'm sorry, you misunderstood me. My question was, have you ever actually sold one? They're fucking terrible and I find it so hard to believe that someone would actually pay $500 for one.
TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com
FROM: (removed)
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: question
FUCK YOU THEY'RE TERRIBLE, WHY DON'T YOU COME TO CANADA AND WE'LL SHOW YOU HOW EROTIC STAINED GLASS IS DONE.
TO: (removed)
FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: question
FUCK YOU COME TO CANADA, WHY DON'T YOU COME TO AMERICA AND I'LL SHOW YOU HOW IT'S DONE.
TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com
FROM: (removed)
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question
FUCK YOU COME TO AMERICA, YOU THINK YOU'RE SO BIG? WHAT DO YOU THINK A $500 EROTIC STAINED GLASS WINDOW LOOKS LIKE?!
TO: (removed)
FROM: highjack@fyadiaf.com
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question
I don't know, something like this?
TO: highjack@fyadiaf.com
FROM: (removed)
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: question
...
You win this round America.
U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!
While working on the first window, it became clear to me that this was something I was going to stick with, not necessarily the erotic, but stained glass in general. Of course I was doing a shtick, so I would be doing at least a bit more of the erotic. I felt the logical progression was to do a set of tits next. That idea turned out to be quite a bit more difficult than I had originally thought.
I took a drawering class once. Sometimes the teacher would lecture, but mainly he would say, "here's a thing, drawer it." He would then walk around the class and give additional instruction to people who needed it. Despite the fact that I almost never got instruction in that class, I learned quite a bit about drawering. I'm not sure that a better drawerer now than I was before the class, but just by drawering for three hours a night I began to learn about the sort of things you can do, the techniques a drawerer has available to them to create a picture. Of course with a pencil you could create a fairly photo-realistic picture, not so with stained glass. You are always going to lose detail, unless it was something that was not finely detailed to begin with (I've seen some stained glass of cartoons that looked pretty much just like they were drawn). I currently feel the key is pick a couple details that you know you can transfer and really define the picture. Let's break down SG1 (as it shall hence be known) to show you what I mean.
It's a big ass and while you can certainly tell that from the width and the fact the underwear doesn't appear to cover it very well, it was hard to make it have depth. I only have so much control over how the colors look, so I can't really do shading. So what can I do? Well the first thing to notice is the lines on the underwear. I broke it up into pieces like that because I tend to associate stained glass with mosaicy things like that and wanted some in this piece. The lines, however, were done in a very specific way. The idea is that the lines sort of radiate out from the place the ass would protrude the most, my hope was that this would suggest stretching of the underwear.
What the upper left arrow is trying to point out is how the underwear slopes downward, to suggest going down from the top of the ass. Also, more zoomed in like this you can see how the individual pieces sort of taper down at the ends, again to suggest wrapping around. The arrow on the side is pointing to how the line of her hip becomes slightly concave, the idea there was to make it clear the underwear was tight and pulling the flesh in slightly. It is, I'm told, hard for big booty girls to find well fitting underwear.
The last thing I want to point out is the bottom stripe of the underwear. That final line is a continuous thing, but because the cheeks are curving in at that point, the middle of the line is wrapped away from view.
Overall, it's very clearly an ass, it's very clearly a big ass and it was not too hard to make a drawering that would transfer and illustrate this.
Back on the topic of tits, I wanted to do a similar sort of thing to SG1, a zoomed in picture of just the rack. The problem was I wanted them to be naked, so I wouldn't be able to use stretched clothing to suggest size/shape. After looking at the terrible art on the aforementioned site, I decided it probably was just not going to be possible to do a straight on shot, at least not with my current skill level and equipment. Luckily there was an obvious solution to the problem, by doing a shot in profile you would get a very clear idea of the size and shape of the breast. For something that simple though, I didn't really want to do just a zoomed in section. This meant the complexity was going to be pushed beyond what I felt I could drawer well. After some searching to find an image of sufficient resolution that I could blow it up to the size I wanted, I settled on this:
This image had a lot going for it. First of all, it is, I feel, very tastefully done. That's important to me because this isn't just supposed to be porn for the sake of porn. The second plus, probably the most important, is the breast is shot in a way that accomplishes what I wanted, it looked like it would look just fine even with just a single flat shade. Another thing it had going for it was the ass, I wanted another crack (HA HA HA) at doing an ass.
I never really did much to indicate the size of SG1, but it's about 1' x 2'. For SG2, given how much more complex it is, I figured I'd up the size to 2' x 2'. I opened the picture in Excel to size it (I have no idea why I do this) and was delighted to find out that it in fact was already 4' x 4' so I could easily get the size I wanted without losing quality. Printed out, I think it was broken up over eight sheets of 8.5 x 14 paper. I taped it together and put it down on the table to begin the pattern making process.
Despite it only being my second piece, it had already become clear to me just how important making the pattern is, how you break it up can really effect how easy it is to cut/grind the individual pieces. I was sort of conscious of that, but not really (that's more of a part two sort of story though). I think it was taped to my dining room table for the better part of two weeks while I tried to decide exactly how I wanted to do it. Initially I tried breaking up the body into as many big pieces as possible, the goal I think was to make it look as much like the photo as possible. This was stupid. As I mentioned earlier, there's a fairly finite limit on how realistic you can make it look, so instead of trying to hit that goal it makes more sense to embrace the medium and run away from it. I looked at some stained glass pictures online (non-erotic) to see how people far more talented than I had done bodies in the past. The general theme seemed to be breaking it up into a bunch of little pieces and just saying "hey, it's stained glass, this is what you're expecting to see." I liked that idea so I kept breaking the bigger sections up smaller and smaller. This would also let me incorporate some approximation of shading into the body. Of course the end result was that the piece as a whole was broken up into over a hundred different chunks. As far as the background coloring went, I wanted to mimic the sort of thing you might see in a cathedral window. This meant a bunch of clear shapes and some nice colors.
I got it to a point that I felt was "done" but I wanted to wait a few days to let it marinate to see if I wanted to change anything as it was becoming clear this was going to be a long project and I wanted to make sure if I was going to put a bunch of work into it that I would like the final product. Then I remembered that my landlady was going to be coming through my apartment for some sort of annual inspection and I didn't want the next time I saw her to be, "So, giant picture of a naked woman on your dining room table, how's that working out?" So this became the final pattern:
Little did I know the problems I would have in store, but that's for part two.
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