What is Hinterglas?

A lot of people find it puzzling at first, when I tell them I draw on glass with graphite pencil, or that I work "backwards" on the reverse side of glass...

So, I invite you, to take a closer look at what all this means:

In Europe, there is a long tradition of so called "Hinterglas" or „sous verre“, which is the name of a technique of painting and simply means "behind glass". In case anyone is interested, there is a more detailed description of the traditional approach on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_glass_painting

For me it all began, when I studied traditional glass painting in my father's studio and a nearby school for glass making and related arts and crafts. At the time my father had just discovered a way to draw on glass with a graphite pencil. The basic concept is quite simple, but I have now refined it over the last 30 years to the point that I think I have a decent idea of what I'm doing and a reasonable amount of control over the outcome.

To better illustrate what I mean by working on the reverse side of the glass, let me first show you a short video clip

The whole piece is created on one side of the sheet of glass. Inverted and... backwards. Meaning, whatever is closest to the viewer later, has to be done first and then you work your way to the background. Exactly the other way round you would do with a painting on canvas for instance. It involves a fair amount of thinking and planing as you have to predict, what it will look like from the other side once you added several layers of paint.

Here is an older piece, where I can show a few steps:

1- Side you work on:

2- Finished:

3- Seen from front:

What makes it tricky is, that its next to impossible to correct mistakes, once you come to a certain point. You can paint over it as many times as you want, the mistake stays on the side from which the finished piece is seen. When you are finished, you turn your sheet of glass around and the artwork is seen through the glass. Hope this makes sense.

A big challenge for me always was to overcome the limitations of traditional Hinterglas, like a very... how should I say... two dimensional look. A lot of it looks to me like it was painted with butter. The use of the pencil combined with an old-masterly glazing technique takes this fascinating old genre to a new dimension and adds a fine hint of transparency and lightness.

All the artwork here as well as on my own previous posts was created by me.

"Fly with me" in https://steemit.com/art/@reinhard-schmid/fly-with-me is a larger painting in Acrylics and oil on board.

All the Tarot cards in https://steemit.com/life/@reinhard-schmid/temple-of-the-secrets were done in the Hinterglas technique described above.

Same as the pictures in https://steemit.com/colorchallenge/@reinhard-schmid/colorchallenge-monday-red and https://steemit.com/art/@reinhard-schmid/open-up

As you can see, I also make my own frames, but that will be a different story