Fig. 45.
Further than this you cannot go: for I cannot at all see how the next process I am to describe can be a good one, though
I once thought, as I suppose most do, that it would really solve the difficulty. What I allude to is the use of the needle.
Of Work Etched out with a Needle.—The needle is a very good and useful tool for stained glass, in certain operations, but I am now to speak of it as being used over whole areas as a substitute for the scrub, in order to deal with a matt too dense for the scrub to penetrate.
The needle will, to be sure, remove such a matt; that is to say, will remove lines out of it, quite clear and sharp, and this, too, out of a matt so dense, that what remains does not fire away much in the kiln. Here is a tempting thing then! to have one's work unchanged by the fire! And if you could achieve this without changing the character of the work for the worse, no doubt this method would be a very fine thing. But let me trace it step by step and try to describe what happens.
You have painted your outline and you put a very heavy matt over it.
Peril No. 1.—If your matt is so dense that it will not fire off, it must very nearly approach the point of density at which it will fry. How then about the portions
of it which have been painted on, as I have said, over another layer of pigment in the shape of the outline? Here is a danger. But even supposing that all is safe, and that you have just stopped short of the danger point. You have now your dense, rich, brown matt, with the outline just showing through it. Proceed to model it with the needle. The first stroke will really frighten you; for a flash of silver light will spring along after the point of the needle, so dazzling in contrast to the extreme dark of the matt that it looks as if the plate had been cut in two, while the matt beside it becomes pitch-black by contrast. Well, you go on, and by putting more strokes, and reducing the surrounding darkness generally, you get the drawing to look grey—but you get it to look like a grey pen-drawing or etching, not like a painting at all. We will suppose that this seems to you no disadvantage (though I must say, at once, that I think it a very great one); but now you come to the deep shadows; and these, I need hardly say, cut themselves out, more than ever, like dark patches or blots, in the manner already spoken of. You try pricking it with the brush I have
described for that operation, and it will not do it; then you resort to the needle itself, and you are startled at the little, hard, glittering specks that come jumping out of the black shadow at each touch. You get a finer needle, and then you sharpen even that on the hone; and perhaps then, by pricking gingerly round the edges of the shadows, you may get the drawing and modelling to melt together fairly well. But beware! for if there is one dot of light too many, the expression of the head goes to the winds. Let us say that such a thing occurs; you have pricked one pinhole too many round the corner of the mouth.