Test Results :: Sky Blue Opalino

Effetre Sky Blue Opalino is a lovely pale blue semi-opaque colour. I used rods from two separate batches (bought eight years apart) and there was no variation to speak of between the two which was nice. It has a unique reaction profile, and I was able to do some pretty fun things with it. And since the Opalino colours are widely feared and reviled, it's not very expensive.  Win!

When I was using this colour on my 5L oxycon, I got a lot of sooting no matter how cool I tried to work and how neutral I tried to keep my flame. It was pretty frustrating. But, at the beginning of September I got a new 10L oxygen concentrator, and it has been a very happy experience discovering that not all of my problems are my own fault!

I don't find this colour particularly shocky, and I didn't have any trouble with boiling it, either.

Here, you can see that in the bead I reduced, some of the brightness has been stolen from the colour. There are two things at work here - the first is that repeatedly striking semi-opaque colours pretty much universally (with the exception of the pink opalinos, and ghee and possibly a few others that are striking colours) opacifies them and lightens the colour. But I do believe that reducing it has changed the colour slightly as well, making it tend a little purpler than in the unreduced beads.

Here's something that I did not expect. This is the first blue that I've tested that turns brown when it's used with silver. It did it both in the bead where the silver is on top of the colour, and the bead where the silver is reduced and encased on top of the colour, although reducing and encasing it resulted in a much lighter brown.

Silver also behaves a bit differently on top of Sky Blue Opalino than it does on   If we look back at one of my early tests of Vetrofond Pajama Blue, which is the colour closest to this one that I've tested (I think - there are really a lot of tests up here at this point), we see that the reactions are quite different. With Pajama Blue, the silver turned brown. In these beads, the colour change is in the Sky Blue Opalino.

In the bead on the left, you can see that the silver glass reduction frit has discoloured the base bead giving it a really interesting antiqued look.  Also, the reduction has deadened the colour of the Sky Blue Opalino, making it contrast better with the colours of the frit.  

In the rightmost bead, although I didn't get the colour very uniformly, I got some gorgeous colours from the TerraNova2 frit towards the bottom edge of the bead.  This tells me that this is a pretty friendly base colour for striking silver glass.

On top of Sky Blue Opalino, Tuxedo looks blue-ish.

Copper Green separates when it's used with Sky Blue Opalino, and when it's used on top, it gets a pinkish grey outline to its dots and stringer lines.

Using Sky Blue Opalino on top of Opal Yellow seems to have helped it to strike a pinkish colour. Opal Yellow and Peace both separate slightly on top of Sky Blue Opalino.

Sky Blue Opalino reacts with Ivory, and you can see that the Sky Blue stringerwork in the leftmost bead has turned a brownish colour, and the Ivory stringer lines and dots are ringed with a faint dark line in the bead on the right.

Here is a very small sample of the fun I am having with Sky Blue Opalino.