Galaxy Glass Art

This Galaxy Glass Art is a very simple craft with great results. I did this project with my 4 year old, so the pictures in the tutorial include close ups of my work and shots of my daughter completing that step. We both had a great time making these and afterwards she wanted to do more! Unfortunately, I didn't have any more empty picture frames left in the house.

Here are the materials you will need to complete this project:

- A picture frame with glass

- Glitter glue

- Food colouring (red, blue, yellow)

- Paintbrush

- Toothpicks (optional)

- Hot glue gun OR E6000 Permanent Craft glue

1) Turn your picture frame face down and remove everything except for the glass.

2) Remove the glass and set to the side, you will need it again in a moment. Apply your hot glue or adhesive all the way around the inner edge of the frame. When I first did this, I used hot glue. However, I took too long to go all the way around the edge of the frame and put the glass in. Because of this the first edge that I did was already starting to harden. If you are doing a small frame and can work fast you can use hot glue. Since I wasn't happy with my hot glue job, I found some E6000 at the back of the craft cupboard. I applied a line of this around the edge and pressed my glass in. When I did my daughter's piece I didn't bother trying the hot glue, I used the E6000 right around and it worked great.

3) Place your glass back into the frame. When the adhesive sets it should hold the glass in place.

Now that our glass is in place we can get started with the fun stuff. You don't need to wait for the E6000 to dry before you start this set. Just jump right in!

1) Squirt big globs of glue onto the glass. Your picture frame should still be face down. We are painting onto the back side of the glass. We used both types of glitter glue that we had. They had different types of glitter in them so it added nice variety to the project.The glitter looks great when the project is complete because it glitters like thousands of tiny stars in your galaxy. :D

2) Use a paintbrush to spread the glitter glue around to cover the glass.

Since we are going for a galaxy theme we used red, blue and just a touch of yellow.

1) Put drops of food colouring onto the wet glitter glue. 1 drop of red and 1 drop of blue together makes the purple that we used in this project. I used purple in three of the four corners. I also used just blue in one corner and a tiny bit of yellow near the middle of one edge. I let my daughter choose where she wanted her colours to be. She just used blue and red.

1) Use your paintbrush to spread and blend the colours. I made most of the glass purple, but I left a swirl of bright blue and yellow. There is a bit of green created from the yellow and blue mixing together. I used light, sweeping brush strokes to blend the edges of the colours and create the galaxy spiral look. Every now and then, pick up your project and (carefully) hold it up to the light so you can better how the light shines through it. I added a lot more purple food colouring to my edges and corners to make the colour darker and more vibrant. My daughter also had fun making interesting lines on hers using a toothpick.

Project complete! She's super happy with her craft and is already talking about how she wants to give it as a present to her JK teacher.

Wait for the glue to completely dry before you start trying to set it up somewhere. Depending on how liberal you were with the glue and food colouring, this may take a while.

You can display your project in a window to let the sunshine through like a stained glass window, or you could just set it up somewhere in your house as an interesting piece of art. It looks good both ways! If you saved the backing to the picture frame, you can place some white paper against the inside of the backing and reattach it to the picture frame (just make sure you wait until it is completely dry!).