Test Results :: Pale Ink Blue

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain - reduced, 3 - w/ Silver foil, 4 - Over Clear, 5 - w/ Silver foil - reduced & encased, 6 - w/ Khaos frit, 7 - w/ Silver glass frit blend (Gaia, Nyx, Elektra) - reduced, 8 - w/ Ivory, 9 - w/ Copper Green

The first question I have, for whoever it was that named this colour, is "What exactly is so pale about Effetre Pale Ink Blue?" Even over Clear, it isn't what I would term 'pale'. In my opinion, it is of 'medium' saturation, and putting it over Clear lightens it up enough that I'd call it 'light'. But, semantics aside, I have grown really fond of this colour and its cousins, Ink Blue and Violet Ink Blue, over the last year or so.

Dwyn Tomlinson posted not long ago about this little colour family, noting that even though all three colours have different names, they aren't really all that different. And I remember having a conversation with someone at the Frantz Bash last year and being told that they are all the same formula, just with slightly (really slightly!) different hue outcomes. This is good news for me, because although I am almost out of Pale Ink Blue, I still have some of the regular stuff, and a bunch of the Violet variety.

General Impressions
The closer a colour is to cobalt, the less likely I am to want any because I really shy away from primary colours, so it's a good thing that Pale Ink Blue has a healthy infusion of purple and is just muted enough to not scare me away.

I didn't get great colour out of Khaos with it, but I used it with a couple of other silver glasses, and I got much nicer results with those. The first bead, below, is Reichenbach Magic over Pale Ink Blue, and the second one is Double Helix R170 over Pale Ink Blue.

 

Reduction
Reducing Pale Ink Blue (Bead #2) had no effect.

Reactions
Pale Ink Blue doesn't seem to really react with silver strongly, making it a nice, neutral medium transparent colour to use silver with. You can see in Bead #3 how the silver just sort of crusted up and stayed on the surface. If you compare this to how the silver behaved with Pale Green Apple, you can really see a difference -- With the Pale Green Apple, it kind've spread over the surface and beaded up, but on the Pale Ink Blue, it just sits in place and gets all crusty.

The most interesting thing that happened as a result of reducing silver foil on top of Pale Ink Blue and then encasing it was how the blue around the silver changed colour and became a little softer and brighter.  The second most interesting thing was the way the silver developed that opaque, blankety look.  I'm starting to wonder whether or not silver will always do this on top of a transparent colour, because it happened for me with Great Bluedini and Pale Green Apple as well.  I guess I'll find out more as I go through the rest of my colours.

I made a complete mess of the Khaos frit on Bead #6, but if you go and look at my test results for any other colour, you will see varying degrees of success (which I attribute to the base colour, not to myself).  Because I had good luck with Pale Ink Blue and other 'striking' colors, I'm going to hypothesize that either I am most of the problem here, or that Khaos just doesn't like Pale Ink Blue as a base color.  I need to buy a rod of Khaos and see if this is just an issue between me and the frit, or if the rod and I will have similar issues.

The frit blend in Bead #7 looks awesome on Pale Ink Blue though.  The reduced frit looks greener on Pale Ink Blue than it did on Pale Green Apple.

When I combined Ivory and Pale Ink Blue, where the Ivory is over top of the Ink Blue, it did the slight spreading / translucent line thing that it seems to like to do over transparent colours but it also curdled a little in an unattractive way. (Bead #8) You can see it doing the same thing on the other side of the bead where the Pale Ink Blue is over the Ivory. Now I know why the flowers I tried to make with Ivory and Pale Ink Blue came out looking so hideous.

I can't blame this on the softness of the Ivory, because when I used Pale Ink Blue with Silver Pink, I didn't have this problem (Silver Pink is uber-soft too).  It is nice, though, that there is a blue that you can use with Ivory without getting that dark line reaction.

Over Copper Green, the edges of the Pale Ink Blue (Bead #9) have a darker, turquoisy outline while the middle appears to be a light periwinkle.  I really like this combination.  The Copper Green didn't do anything nice over the Pale Ink Blue at all.

Here are some other beads made with Pale Ink Blue, some old and some new: