Test Results :: Olive (Reichenbach)

Reichenbach Olive (RL4203) is a very pretty medium green. It's an opaque colour in that you can't see through it when you use it in thick layers, but I think it would be more accurate to call this colour an "opal" because it is definitely transparent when pulled thin, and has a sort of glow to it even when used in solid, self-coloured beads.

This is a little odd, but it seems like maybe Olive gets lighter when you strike it. I am used to striking colours darkening with repeated heating and cooling, but this one seems to do the opposite. This only happened in the beads where I restruck the colour in a reduction flame, so maybe it only happens in a propane-rich environment.

Here is Olive with a bunch of lighter colours, and then with it's closest colour cousin, CiM Shrubbery. Unlike many 104 CoE greens, Olive is not even a little bit streaky. This is nice if you're going for a more solid-looking green and not looking for an organic effect.

Silver on top of Olive doesn't change its basic greenness at all. When the silver is reduced and encased on top of Olive, its edges turn blue.

I got pretty colour out of both my reducing silver glass and my TerraNova2 frit on top of this Olive.

Here, you can really see how Olive thins out to translucency when applied in a thin layer.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace all separate on top of Olive.  Out of these, only Opal Yellow separates when Olive is used on top of it.

When Olive is used on top of Copper Green, a thin outline of a lighter turquoise is visible around the Olive stringer lines and dots.

Here is an Olive goddess bead. I want to make some additional beads with this colour because I still have some, but they aren't ready yet. I'll come back and update this post with them after they're made.

Test Results :: Olive (Creation is Messy)

CiM Olive is the second glass by the name 'Olive' that I have tested now, and the third that I am aware of.  We can hope that it's the last one and that other manufacturers, seeing that there are already three (or more) glasses by this name, will choose some other thing when and if they move ahead with plans for another olive green-coloured glass.  Don't get me wrong... I welcome any and all colours to the 104 COE palette.  Even when they are named the same thing, they are all deliciously different and interesting to play with.  It's just confusing to talk about them when one name could reference multiple different actual colours.

Olive is darker and 'greener' than what I would normally think of when picturing olives, and reminds me more of the colour of the frogs we used to catch when I was a kid when my parents would take us camping.  For that reason, I would have named this particular glass 'Kermit' or 'Tadpole' or something else frog-related had it been left up to me.

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 7 - w/ Tuxedo, 8 - w/ Copper Green, 9 - w/ Opal Yellow, 10 - w/ Ivory, 11 - w/ Peace

So... all whining about the name aside, CiM Olive is a gorgeous green.  It's got a unique texture to it, being very smooth and streaky at the same time. It is also, for lack of a better word, somewhat more gelatinous than the other opaque CiM colours and way less 'grainy' than some of the Effetre greens (e.g. Pea Green, Nile Green, Grass Green).  Used in a thin layer over Peace, it lightens in colour significantly.  Because it is a little less saturated than some of the other greens, it gives an interesting effect when used as the core of vine twisties and canes, lending a bit of an inner glow. Cane made by using a thin layer of Olive over a thick base of Clear gives an interestingly semi-opaque result.

Silver leaf melted into the surface of Olive leaves a greyish/brownish residue behind. The silver discolours slightly, ranging from grey to a blueish tinted grey to a yellowish/brown. In the bead on the right, you can see that when the silver is subsequently reduced and encased that it seems to form an ethereal film over the Olive, and retains some of the blueishness (new word!) but otherwise does not much change the Olive underneath.

My TerraNova2 frit didn't strike very well in the bead on the left, but I think that was my fault.  The thin green halos that have sprung up around it are a bit of a clue that Olive is capable of greater things with silver glass frit than I was able to coax from it in this particular bead.  In the bead on the right, the reducing silver glass also has an interesting curdling effect on the Olive where it touches the base colour and has thinned out in weird and wonderful ways.

When used on top of CiM Tuxedo, Olive develops a thin silvery line around itself in dots and stringer work.  When Tuxedo is used on top of Olive, a greyish green halo pops up around it.  This is a very interesting set of reactions for a couple of reasons.

First, Tuxedo bleeds with a lot of the other greens I've tried it with, so it is very refreshing for Olive to be a green that it does not bleed into. Second, a lot of the colours I have tested with Tuxedo recently have had this silver halo effect, but this is the first time I've gotten this reaction between Tuxedo and a green.

Olive makes Copper Green not want to be green at all.  The darkness of the Copper Green here is very out of character, and the interesting brownish mottling in the centre of the bead is an effect I've not seen before.  Where I've used Copper Green over Olive, it seems to have caused a little curdling chaos in the Olive underneath.

Opal Yellow and Olive do not have any noticeable reaction apart from (possibly) a minor amount of bleeding of the Olive into the Opal Yellow when Olive us used on top of it.  You can make out a faint greenish halo around the Olive dots and stringer lines in the left side of this bead if you click on the picture to see an enlarged version of it.

With Ivory, Olive develops an interesting, irregular brownish dark line reaction.  It does this both when Ivory is used on top of it and when it is used on top of Ivory.  The reaction when Ivory is used on top of Olive is the more dramatic of the two.

Peace and Olive do not have much of a reaction with one another, but it is very interesting to me how much lighter the Olive looks on top of Peace than it does on top of any other colour. The Peace on the left-hand side of the bead seems to have acquired some of the colour from the Olive without leaving any noticeable evidence of 'bleeding'.

I let one of my friends walk off with what was left of my Olive before I'd made many beads with it, and all I've used it in so far is vine cane.  That vine cane is attached to beads I'm not ready to show anyone yet, so I"ll end this here.

Test Results :: Olive (Lauscha)

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit Blend (reduced), 7 - w/ Tuxedo, 8 - w/ Copper Green, 9 - w/ Opal Yellow, 10 - w/ Ivory, 11 - w/ White

General Impressions
Lauscha Olive looks almost black when it's hot. It is also a very stiff, very dense colour. It is a pleasure to use in stringer form because of its stiffness.

This colour is also very reactive, and does crazy things with other colours. I have not done my tests yet for CiM Olive (This is a thankless, endless job I've set myself! Someday I'll get to it) but I don't think the two colours, apart from both being a similar olive-y shade of green, have much in common. I don't expect CiM Olive to do the same kinds of weird, spready reactive things that this Lauscha Olive does, but I'm sure that it has compelling secrets of its own for me to discover.

My Lauscha Olive rods are pretty thick - possibly around 9mm in diameter. The glass is surprisingly not-shocky for its girth, which was also my experience with Lauscha Cocoa. After you've melted some of the rod and you reintroduce it to the flame you're likely to lose the tip of it, but apart from that it's smooth sailing with this colour.

Reactions

One of the things I'm discovering is that a lot of the colours that are full of endless organic fun do this blue thing with silver that you see in the bead on the right. On top of Olive, silver leaf melted in sort of disappears and forms some blue-ish blotches. Once the silver is reduced and encased, it forms a shiny armour-like patina over the Olive with a fumed blue haze around it.  Awesome.

The reactions with silver are NOT one of the ways Lasucha Olive and Lauscha Cocoa are similar. Olive is WAY nicer with silver and striking silver glass than Cocoa is.

I got better colour out of my TerraNova2 frit on top of Olive than I have with almost any other colour. Lauscha Olive is much nicer with the striking silver glass frit here than with the reduction frit blend.

Lauscha Olive is odd with Tuxedo only in that almost every other green that I have tried with Tuxedo has stirred Tuxedo into a crazy, webbing frenzy. With Olive, Tuxedo is simply a nice, crisp Black. The only strange thing I see in this bead is that where the Tuxedo and Olive portions of the bead met in the middle, the Olive is a bit lighter.

Whoah. I thought that Lauscha Cocoa was cool with Copper Green, but as cool as that reaction was, this one blows it away. On top of Olive, Copper Green develops a light outline, and then a silvery inner outline with a concentration of a darker teal colour in the centre.  Three rings for the price of one :)

On top of Copper Green, Lauscha Olive seems to spread a little and take on a faint translucency, and a light turquoise watercolour outline surrounds the Olive dots and lines.

On top of Opal Yellow, Lauscha Olive loses its vibrancy, and it does weird things to the Opal Yellow underneath it. The Opal Yellow on the right side of this bead almost seems to have a crack in it, but that's just a transparent crease formed by this reaction.

On the left side of this bead, the Opal Yellow dots and lines have developed a light yellow outline and the inside of them has blushed a pinkish orange colour. Another really cool reaction here.

On top of Lauscha Olive, Ivory develops a fine, translucent line in the middle of its dots and lines. On top of Ivory, Lauscha Olive loses its cohesion a little and bleeds. This reaction is pretty similar to what happened with Lauscha Cocoa and Ivory, although Cocoa is a little better at it than Olive is.

And finally, White separates a little on top of Lauscha Olive (but not as much as Ivory does) and Olive spreads on top of White (but not as much as on top of Ivory).

Fun beads with Olive: