Test Results :: Sepia Unique #1

1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - Over silver foil (over Tuxedo), 4 - w/ Silver Leaf, 5 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 6 - Over Ivory as a floral, 7 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 8 - w/ Silver glass frit - reduced (Gaia, Kronos, Black Nebula, Elektra), 9 - w/ Silver glass frit (same as #8) stringer (over Tuxedo, encased), 10 - w/ Ivory, 11 w/ White

General Impressions

Sepia Unique is a light tan transparent, a little less vibrant than Effetre Light Brown Transparent. It's a nice, neutral colour but it is really prone to boiling if you get it too hot. I had to really concentrate on holding it high up in the flame to melt in order to avoid this.

Sepia Unique is also a really stiff colour, making the wait time to melt it high up in the flame sort of irritating. The stiffness of it, though, makes it really press-friendly.

All that said, I fell a little bit in love with this colour, and am burning to know if the regular batch of Sepia will do the same things as this one or not. That will be the subject of a future blog post I'm sure. The reaction with silver, as you will see, is just breathtaking.

Reduction

Reducing Sepia Unique all by itself did not have any real impact on the colour. A faint streakiness appeared, but it was barely noticeable in the finished bead.  (Bead #2)

Reactions

Here is an interesting situation... the beads made with silver leaf are more beautiful than the beads made with silver glass.  I don't think this has ever happened to me before. That's not to say that this colour isn't good with silver glass, because it is, but holy crap... this is the most interesting silver reaction I've seen yet through my testing. I need to revisit Light Brown Transparent at some point and perform these tests, because I didn't do them for that colour and think the results will be educational.

Silver turns Sepia Unique a darker brown colour. The bead on the left has silver leaf just melted into the surface.  The silver has formed a thin, bubbly crust on top of the Sepia Unique and also taken on a decidedly blue-ish hue in places.

The bead on the right just kills me... I can't get over how cool it is. It is silver leaf melted into a core of Sepia Unique, then reduced and encased with Effetre Clear. Here, the blues and purples are amazing.  I did learn though that if you overstrike this reaction, it turns to mud just like when you overstrike silver glass.

If you have a look at Bead #3, you will see that the silver foil under the Sepia Unique turned a gentle, muted golden colour.  It does this under Light Brown, Pale Green Apple and Straw Yellow, too. You have to sort of look at the edges of the bead to see it since I got the thing too stinking hot and melted most of the silver up. 

I was expecting (I know... I know better) more compelling results from this glass with silver glass because of my Light Brown Transparent testing, but I didn't get them. I did get good colours in my TerraNova2 though.  This colour makes a good base for silver glasses, but I like the way the striking colour behaved better than what I got from the reducing ones. 

In Bead #8, I made a frit stringer with Sepia Unique and my reduction silver glass blend and pulled it out, and then encased Tuxedo with it before encasing the whole thing with Clear. As I mentioned in my results for Dark Grass Green, I'm planning to do this test in future without the dark core and just use the test colour in there. In any case, I got pretty decent striations with the frit stringer on Tuxedo, so I'm going to try this again this weekend over a core of Sepia Unique to see if it can be even better.

Nothing terribly interesting to report with either Ivory or White. Ivory did not separate on this colour the same way it did on Light Brown Transparent though, which is noteworthy.

For follow-up, I need to get myself some regular batch Sepia to see if the reactions here are unique to this particular unique batch. I really want to do more with that reduced silver leaf reaction, so I hope that the regular Sepia will behave similarly.