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Designing suncatchers can be a real waste of time. If you don't know how to draw it could take hours to get the right design, and it still may not look right. There are places to get a lot of free patterns, though you will have to do a little work to get them. Some are easy to find, you can find them as examples of what you can buy (like in the back of a catalog), you just have to enlarge them several times over.
Corel Draw has a ton of designs that are pretty easy to convert to stained glass patterns. Super Tomato (at the top of the screen), was a Corel design. Originally it was a mandarin orange with a cape on it. It didn't make much sense that way so I made it into a tomato, it makes much more sense that way. :)
I took a lot of patterns from a print shop type program, there are a lot of designs there, I just had to convert them into a .CDR file and import them into Corel Draw and edit them. The pictures below are suncatchers I made up with those graphics.
Below is a Corel design (a chocolate cow).
And this drawing was from a lawn wood cutout catalog (you know like the fat people bending over decorations, which gives that lawn a touch of class). It took a lot of work to get an outline from a dithered page, but the results came out really well. I had to use a lot of overlays for this one.
Many ideas come from taking pictures of other peoples work (such as mine). Surf around the net, there are a lot of patterns, already made up. You can find new ideas and new color schemes from them, just save them somewhere. Other ideas, like for panels, were once photo's or images from magazines. In the Japanese Garden panel, the building was a photo from my vacation. The trees from a magazine, along with the flowers and roses. The bridge was the only hand drawn thing there. Everything was basically traced and compiled using an opaque projector and a pencil.
My Butterfly window were all from photo's, the tree however was a branch off my apple tree and I simply traced it. The balloon panel is one of my favorites because I designed it all myself, using only a few pictures as reference (for shape).
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Started on 9-22-98