We use the gluing construction introduced by Jia Huang to explore the rings of invariants for a range of modular representations. We construct generating sets for the rings of invariants of the maximal parabolic subgroups of a finite symplectic group and their common Sylow p-subgroup. We also investigate the invariants of singular finite classical groups. We introduce parabolic gluing and use this construction to compute the invariant field of fractions for a range of representations. We use thin gluing to construct faithful representations of semidirect products and to determine the minimum dimension of a faithful representation of the semidirect product of a cyclic p-group acting on an elementary abelian p-group.