Test Results :: Pastel Ink Blue

Some distributors call this colour Pastel Ink Blue, Some leave off the word 'Pastel' and simply call it Ink Blue, and Frantz uniquely calls it Lavender Blue Light.  For clarity, I'll add that it's Effetre #247, but I think of it as Pastel Ink Blue, so for the purposes of this post you will have to as well.

Pastel Ink Blue is a medium indigo opaque.  It is greyer and purpler (is that word?) than Periwinkle, and it is bluer than the Effetre light violet pastels (272, 273). Depending on what you use it with, it can look more grey than either blue or purple, so choosing the right accompaniments is very important, unless purplish grey is what you are after.

This colour is also very, very soft.  I think it is even softer than White, Ivory, and Opal Yellow.

Here in these self-coloured spacers, you can see that reducing Pastel Ink Blue doesn't have any effect on its colour.

Pastel Ink Blue is not adversely reactive with silver.  The silver spread out on top of it and can't even be seen in my leftmost bead apart from some little glints where it's reflecting the light and a bit of mottling it caused on the surface of the Pastel Ink Blue.  The mottling is pretty interesting to me - I haven't seen a lot of that with this test.  In the bead on the right, you can see that reducing and encasing the silver on top of Pastel Ink Blue has resulted in a soft white blankety effect, which is lacy where the silver has dispersed in a non-uniform way.

Reducing my silver glass frit on top of Pastel Ink Blue resulted in a brownish haze overtaking the base colour. In both of these beads, the Pastel Ink Blue has retreated from the silver glass leaving light halos around all of the fritty bits.  The striking silver glass made a good start on its striking sequence, indicating to me that this colour might be a decent base for silver glass.

This colour separates with Opal Yellow and Tuxedo, and it causes separation reactions in Copper Green, and to a lesser extent, Opal Yellow and Peace. On top of Ivory, its edges are hazy and sort of indistinct.

Here are some fun beads with Pastel Ink Blue.

Test Results :: Gold Ruby Light

This is Reichenbach Gold Ruby Light (RL2013), a light to medium transparent pink.

For me, this colour ended up anywhere from completely colourless to a pretty, deep medium pink colour. It's a striking colour, and I had some trouble getting decent colour out of it in my smaller beads, which is my problem and probably not an issue with the glass.

I found this colour very difficult to strike in the small spacers that I made, but it struck a bit more easily for me in my larger test beads.  I found this colour a little bit scummy, and it's also quite stiff. Reducing does not seem to alter its colour or surface finish.

On top of Gold Ruby Light, silver develops a crusty appearance.

I had bad luck encasing a solid mass of this colour - you can see here in the middle bead that one side of the bead just sort of fell off.  It didn't crack in the middle on the mandrel line, so it was definitely a compatibility crack. Like some of the other pinks, I guess this one isn't very encaseable -- maybe due to a viscosity clash with runnier glass. I made another bead with only a thin layer of Gold Ruby Light in it, and kept an eye on it for a few months, and it didn't crack.

In the rightmost bead, you can see that encasing silver foil with Gold Ruby Light turns the silver a golden colour.

I don't have much to say about these beads.  Gold Ruby Light isn't very reactive for a pink and didn't astonish me with it's interaction with silver glass.

The only real reactions that I see in these beads are some separation in the Copper Green and Peace on top of Gold Ruby Light.

Something that I appreciate about Reichenbach Gold Ruby Light is that it doesn't turn Ivory black the way other pinks can, although the pink colour of it is so gentle that it doesn't really show very well on top of it. Reichenbach Gold Violet didn't do it either.  I wonder if Pink Lady does?  I guess I'll find out sometime after I've used up all of my Gold Ruby Light, which is going to take a while since I'm not that into it :)

Test Results :: Arke

Double Helix Arke is a bit of a funny one. It's transparent, and sort of a medium level of darkness/saturation, so it doesn't really hold its own with other colours the way Triton and Psyche do. However, do not be deceived by the fugliness of my test beads. Arke is a seriously beautiful colour when you use it right.

Arke is also very reactive and a bit sensitive to over-reduction, so it's important to go slowly when you reduce Arke so that you don't discolour it.  It's always a good idea when you reduce the reduction colours to do it a little bit at a time.  When you encase reduced Arke, it has a mother-of-pearl shininess under the clear layer that is easy to achieve and easy to keep.

Arke, reduced on its own, can yield a beautiful rainbow of colours with repeated and targeted reduction.

On the left here, you can see a plain, self-coloured Arke spacer that shows the medium dark blue hue of unreduced Arke. On the right, a lightly reduced self-coloured Arke spacer that shows some surface lustre.

This bead is a core of Arke, reduced, and then encased with clear. I've encased Arke before without so much yellow, and I think that the reason I got so much yellow here is because the Arke was over-reduced.

These beads were made with an Arke core, encased with four different clears. I did not over-reduce these beads, and you can see that the clear you use to encase Arke can really change how it looks after encasing.  The clears I used here are Effetre Super Clear (006), Reichenbach Crystal, CiM Experimental, and Double Helix Zephyr.

These beads, unattractive though they may be, showcase how very reactive Arke is. I did not reduce these beads, so any surface sheen is due either to reactions or to the colours behaviour in a neutral flame.  It is sort of interesting that you can see the strange surface sheen with Tuxedo, Copper Green, and Ivory but not with either Peace or Opal Yellow.

It was surprising to me that you can see Arke on top of and underneath Tuxedo. Usually when I test a transparent colour (silver glass or no) I do not expect to see much action with Tuxedo because I'm not reducing it.  For example, if you look back at the test beads that I made for Precision 104 Black Pearl, you can see that colour is completely invisible with Tuxedo. In these beads, Arke has developed a sort of ghostly sheen wherever it meets Tuxedo.

Arke on top of Copper Green develops an interesting shiny halo inside the Arke stringerwork. Copper Green turns an odd, splotchy pinkish brown colour underneath Arke. When Copper Green is used on top of Arke, it separates. Copper Green often does this on top of other colours, but what is unique about the reaction with Arke is that the exterior of the Copper Green stringerwork turned brownish in the rightmost bead.

Using Arke on top of Opal Yellow fumed the Opal Yellow a deeper yellow in places.  When I used Opal Yellow on top of Arke, the Opal Yellow developed a darker yellowish brown outline.

Arke on top of Ivory is pretty awesome. It separates so that the middle of dots and stringer lines have a bluer appearance than the edges, and it develops a strong dark line reaction with Ivory that really makes it pop.  You can see that where I used Arke on top of Ivory, it has also made the Ivory curdle a little bit underneath it. Ivory develops a strong brown outline when it is used on top of Arke as well as an outer, lighter edge to that line which gives it some pretty neat definition.

Arke on top of Peace looks more like bluish brown glass with a brown outline than blue glass on top of white.  Where Peace is used on top of Arke, it separates, developing a strong brown outline.

Here are some beads made with Arke.