September 30, 2025
Spray Painting Glass
In this video, Emanuel Nowak and Matthias Seel detail an innovative and experimental process for Spray Printing Glass. The project began as a seemingly impossible challenge from a colleague, Erwin, to create glass structures using a modified airbrush system. The team, including a glassblower and engineers, adapted a metal repair torch to spray 100-micron thick soda-lime and borosilicate glass beads onto various substrates like stone, glass, and woven sheets. The initial results were rough and porous, with a "Swiss cheese"-like structure at the interface between the print and the base plate. Through iterative experimentation, they refined the process by adjusting parameters like the burner type, nozzle heat, and using a heating chamber. This led to more transparent, translucent prints with fewer pores and better adhesion, allowing them to create larger and more complex small-scale structures. The vision for this technique spans from artistic applications like glass graffiti to functional architectural panels with potential for improved stiffness or acoustic performance. The video was produced by the Open GLASSroom project. Special thanks to Emanuel Nowak and Matthias Seel for contributing to the Open GLASSroom OER collection. The creation of these resources has been (partially) funded by the ERASMUS+ grant program of the European Union under grant no. 2022-1-DE01-KA220-HED-000089750. Neither the European Commission nor the project's national funding agency DAAD are responsible for the content or liable for any losses or damage resulting of the use of these resources.