Colour and Glass
Utopia is defined by the colourful glass we produce all over Europe. We spend a lot of time sourcing and nurturing our relationship to skilled individuals and hotshops in order to offer this very unique and rare material to our customers.
Glass blowing in general, but coloured glass in particular, is not made in many places. There are a handful of places where this kind of glass can be produced in the whole world, and all of them have unique (and secret) recipes for their colours.
The coloured glass batch
All our colours are solid - this means they are inherent in the glass. We work with large pots of melted colours, and mix these colours to form yet another colour. It can be visualised like watercolours, where yellow and blue make a green, and when diluted with water it becomes lighter.
In the same way we create our pallets of colours, and sometimes the results are turly unique.
Glass pots | These get changed once a year, and in this image you see the old discarded pots cooling outside the hotshop
When mixing colours together we can layer them or put them next to each other. When we layer the colours the result is often a dense and muted aesthetic, where the pieces can be very different from piece to piece.
In this image you see one Vessel with Amber and Blue NEXT to each other . The small Vessel has amber and blue OVER one another .
We also work with coloured rods, this gives us a wide variety of colours, hundreds to choose from. For these colour rods there are two manufacturers in the whole world, both of them in Germany, and we have unique access to their expertise and alchemy.
Oven for colour rod production
When working with these colours we can achieve very punchy and vibrant colours , but also special effects can be achieved. Like any good alchemist, we don’t give away our secrets, but many of our striking colour mixes come from colours produced with GOLD and SILVER.
Gold is used to create the colour red, and silver is often used in green and blue tones.
Our Heiki Buckets are made from rod colours. In our Rainbow Heiki we work with two colours- Red and Blue, and where these two meet a third one appears like magic.
This, is just one of the very magical aspects of coloured glass, and we pride ourselves to have built a palette of colours that is truly unique in this world.