2016 The making of the colorcharts

To give you an idea how I make my colourcharts, I photographed the process.

First I ordered and bought all the colours glass which where missing on the former charts. There are still a few colours missing, but I hope to get my hands on them soon so I can finish the posters and send them of to the printer.

To give you an idea, I have bought about 200 new colours which are not on the posters from 2011 and 2013. At this moment there are about 600 colours on the charts on the website and I am still working on 60 Ornela beads. I will upload these to the website in the next few days.

On arrival, I sort them out by number.

To speed things up I use a portacanne to preheat the rods and I make sure I have enough dipped mandrels.

I use the 3 in one lentil press from Cattwalk. As you can see it is well used. Before I make a bead, I write the name and number of the glass I will use on a sticker which I attach on the mandrel.

My little oven is wonderful, I can stack so many mandrel in.

Next is the boring part, cleaning. I have to be careful not to mix things up. So I clean one bead at the time, remove the name/number sticker and put the cleaned and dry bead with the sticker on a piece of paper.

I keep them in ordered by number to avoid mistakes.

Then comes the photographing part. I photograph them in the same manner I did in 2009 to avoid to many differences between the photographs although my photo gear has be update to professional equipment now.

To get the colours right, I use a professional gray and colour card. In Lightroom I can set the white-balance exactly as it should as I do photograph all my photos in Raw format.

I photograph them in the same order as the are on the paper so I can rename them properly in Adobe Lightroom. Then I make sure the whitebalance is corrected and I make sure the colour is right.

Then I move the file over to Photoshop to crop the photo, make it square, make the background totally white and remove dust and other annoying things. Before saving the file, I make sure the colour is exactly matching. I work on a calibrated monitor so what I see on my screen is accurate.

For showing the beads on the internet, I have to add a watermark. I hate this, but people where stealing my photos and even printing them on stuff they sold.

The next phase will be to sort all the colours by brand and number and add them in Adobe Indesign to make a pdf for the printer. This is also a time consuming operation. I will start this when I have all or most of the missing colours.

I know not all colours on my charts are available any more, but I made the decision to show all colours I have at the moment I make the posters. Manufacturers couldn’t reproduce some colours and they have become limited or don’t exist any more, but since I have made the beads and photos, I will add them to the collection.

I haven’t included the Effetre Cool colours for that same reason. With the Ornela colours, sometimes they give them a new number just below or above because the colour hue is a little bit different.

Manufacturers are still developing new colours so the posters will never be finished. I try to keep up, but it takes a lot of time and money.

If you see a colour missing on the online charts and you want to donate me half a rod, I would be very grateful. Please contact me first, because maybe I have the glass but didn’t have the time to update them on the website.

As I have a lot of other things going on, I can’t tell you when the new posters will be ready. In the mean time prices of the “old” posters are reduced with 25%. You can buy the posters at the Glasss webshop.

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