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Paper Stained Glass Lampshades
Mounted seethrough lampshade
The finished see-through lampshade mounted on the lamp.

Background

Sagrada Familia examples
Sagrada Familia museum.
Sagrada Familia wall
Sagrada Familia stained glass walls.
Sagrada Familia studio

This project was inspired by my visit to the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and to the other Gaudi-designed buildings in the city. There was a lot of mosaic about, and I particularly liked the colours and stained glass within the church.

Sagrada Familia gift shop wine glass
The gift shop had a wine glass in the style of stained glass, which gave me some ideas.

I had also just recently moved into my new flat, and wasn’t a fan of the existing, beige lampshades. They needed to be changed to something more fun asap. I was so inspired, in fact, that I started this project the moment I got back from the trip.

Getting started

Ideally these lampshades would be made of mosaic glass, but not having done any of that before, and not having the materials or tools for it, I started with paper (and clear film). The lampshades are a conical shape, with a circular base and top.

I’ve got an A4 colour printer so that was to be the maximum size of paper I could use, and thankfully A4 was just large enough to wrap around the lampshade so it could be done in one piece.

Lampshade shape test with paper
Testing the shape with plain paper.

I found this handy tool to generate a template for the shape it should be: Template Maker

WIP screenshot of template
(Technically A4 was just slightly too small but in practice it did the job)

The Images

I wanted the lampshades to evoke the feeling of stained glass, so I needed something to print that looked roughly like it. I had a go at searching Google for suitable images, but nothing struck my fancy.

Thankfully, we live in an age where we have chopped up all art in existence and fed it to the machines, so I was able to ask them to create me some stained-glass-looking images with the colour palettes that I wanted, and they did an admirable job. I don’t remember which image generator I used.

Golden cloak mosaic
Golden cloak mosaic
Abstract mosaic
Abstract mosaic
Sunflower mosaic
Sunflower mosaic

The Lampshades

There’s already some photos at the top, but here they are again:

Mounted colourful lampshades
The colourful lampshades on white paper.
Mounted colourful lampshades closeup
Close-up of the paper texture.
Mounted seethrough lampshade
The see-through version.
Mounted seethrough lampshade closeup
Close-up of the transparent film.
Mounted seethrough lampshade with cloak

The Very Dark One

As an experiment I thought what if I created one that is mostly opaque, and only has a small part which lets out light.

Kiss of Despair
An old piece of art from 2018 I could use for this.

The results were underwhelming.

Mounted black lampshade
Mounted black lampshade from distance.

There’s a lot of light that comes out from the top and bottom of the shade, which are open, which diminishes the effect I was going for. Also, the blackness of the page even with fully black ink wasn’t enough to fully block the light from behind, so the light image doesn’t actually pop as much as I had imagined.

Improvements

Photo of shape and image mismatch
Aligning the image to the curve
  • The generated images are rectangular, while the shape of the lampshade is curved. This means the photo doesn’t neatly wrap around, which would be problematic if you wanted something to flow along the edge or point vertically upward etc. This could be solved by warping the image, I guess, or generating an image along the constraints perhaps. But for the abstract images I was using it was not that noticeable so I didn’t bother with anything other than rotating the image to the most appropriate direction.
  • The ink came out very faint on the see-through film. Maybe if I increased saturation and dropped the brightness before printing it would look more striking?
  • Would be nice to add some finishing touches like doing up the edges somehow so everything looks a bit neater.