Test Results :: Pastel Blue

Reichenbach Pastel Blue (RL3203) is a gorgeous medium turquoise colour.  It's extremely soft, so maybe not the best and least frustrating choice for sculptural work, but it seems to be magical with silver glass and it's very reactive and fun with other colours.

Here's a bunch of tricolour beads that give you an idea how it compares to the other turquoises out there colour-wise.  I made these when I was playing with CiM Quetzal, which is also gorgeous. Kathy, if you're reading this, make more Quetzal please :D

Like some of the other Reichenbach glasses (Raku, Iris Dense Blue) it is very, very "fast" and I've found that it is important to be vigilant with these super-runny colours to make sure that the bead goes into the kiln very cool, otherwise it sticks to other things in there.  It's always important, of course, to be careful of this, but these supersoft, supersaturated colours remain tacky longer than most.

If you reduce Pastel Blue you get a brick red colour.  I found that this effect developed in a blotchy way, but I only did it the once and so that might have been anomaly.  Something that happened with the reduction that I was not expecting is the iridescence that developed on the surface. Most turquoises get the red patina, although it is not always this dark and rich of a red, but this is the only one I've tried that also got a shiny oilslick finish.

This colour turns silver yellow, both when it is and is not encased. The silver isn't very visible on the surface of the unreduced bead because it has dispersed across the surface, but if you reduce it and encase it, you can see that it's still very much there.  Not maybe the most attractive combination, but I like to see how all of the glasses behave with silver :)

Like other turquoises, reducing silver glass is a bit of a wash on this colour because it doesn't provide much contrast, but I got some beautiful colours out of my TerraNova2 frit.

Pastel Blue sort of lost its opacity when used on top of Tuxedo and I'm not sure how to describe what happened. My Pastel Blue dots and lines on top of Tuxedo have a translucent, battered appearance and look almost purple in places.  And then in the rightmost bead, you can see that when I used Tuxedo on top of Pastel Blue, nothing interesting happened at all. Weird.

Pastel Blue separates on top of Copper Green, and Copper Green separates on top of Pastel Blue. Reciprocity!

Pastel Blue loses some of its opacity and develops a dark vein of blueness through the centre of stringer lines drawn on top of Opal Yellow. On top of Pastel Blue, Opal Yellow separates and looks distinctly yellow. Much yellower than it looked when I used it as the base colour.

Pastel Blue and Ivory develop a black line reaction between them. As an added bonus, Pastel Blue takes on a mottled appearance on top of Ivory which I rather like. This is worth doing more of.

I had a bit of a brain fart when I made these beads and after making the one with the Pastel Blue base, I couldn't figure out whether I'd used Opal Yellow or Peace where I was meant to be placing the Peace stringer lines and dots.  To compensate, I made an extra bead that had Peace on top of Pastel Blue, just in case. In that extra little bead, you can see that on top of Pastel Blue, Peace does not really react at all.  On top of Peace, Pastel Blue spreads and looks translucent.

I only had a small amount of this colour, so I haven't been able to do much with it.  I made these beads with Pastel Blue, Purple Rose, and something else that I don't remember.