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ART OF STAINED GLASS
Dark, Yet Luminous The first instinct of new stained glass crafters, when seeing a drawing for lead lines, is to envision it filled with a variety of colors, much how one might in a coloring book. One is justly inspired by the works of Louis Comfort Tiffany, where the glass, rich in texture, color and patterns, takes center stage, and has its own voice. To obtain similar results, once must think beyond mere patterns and colors, and pay heed to the various levels of transparency of the glass. You must ALWAYS remember that you are not merely painting with "colour" but with LIGHT, and painting with light means being mindful of darker areas vs. lighter areas. Tiffany often "darkened" areas by layering pieces and sections together. This is how important the values of light were to him (and, to be fair, his contemporaries), it was worth the expense and effort to be produced with multiple layering. Examine the pumpkins below. If they seem to glow, it's because they truly do. Off-center, set in a dark, impressionist garden whose leaves are merely suggested by streaky glass that unexpectly brings in some bright red, perhaps to distribute some of the "heat" of the orange color throughout the picture, avoiding a binary situation of completely cold-colored foliage with stark orange globes. 
Removing the color, we can look deeper into the distribution of light. Notice that the center of the rectangle is very dark. This is a sophisticated concept, as it is very much contrary to the natural tendency we have to place the object of interest in the center, bright and bold. Here the center is a void around which the more colorful elements are unevenly distributed 
Indeed the center gives little light. Very asymmetrically, we have too large fruits on the right, and a hint of light on a smaller fruit on the left. This is another sophisticated concept where the distribution of light vs. dark creates a path for your eye to lazily travel. Below is a diagram of where your glance may be drawn, covering an area much like a crescent moon. It is a harmonious shape for one's glance to dwell in. 
Tiffany tried to rely on glass painting as little as possible, his preference was for the glass to be created with the desired patterns and textures, except for subjects with hands and faces that needed some painting. This is another work by Tiffany that has a very interesting distribution of light. A naive interpretation of the lead lines would dictate that the person in the foreground, with all the painted details, be lighter that the background. However, Tiffany chose a more sophisticated approach, which is to have the principal subject backlit, and the bright sky, made up of rich fracture streamer, emphasized. 
If you isolate the "lead lines" (they are confounded by some of the very dark areas), this is what the original drawing might have looked like: 
The "naive" coloring might have looked like the image below: 
However, this was not the approach taken. Look below at the black and white transformation, and notice that the brightest areas are a pear shape, which is broken, at 2/3 height, by the raised arm. Analyze the way your gaze travels through this beautiful piece of art. You want to move about that pear shape, the drapery glass that makes up the cloth, and the magnificient fracture streamer. But as you gaze, your eyes are drawn, by what feels like an invisible force, leftward and upward along the arm, and to the hand. The movement of the raised arm, its vitality, is transmitted to the viewer in the way the eye is forced to move about. Now look again at the naively colored version. Your eyes are fixated on the middle of the arm. If you try to look away from the arm, you are drawn to it quite jarringly. This is why the backlit idea works so well; the eye movements it produces are more graceful than those in the naive version. 
THE READER - This very dark stained glass window, painted with great skill by Tiffany employee Clara Driscoll, highlights the sublime ripples in the collar - sadly my picture does not do it justice. 
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