Test Results :: Electric Yellow

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

Effetre Electric Yellow is not all that electric. For some reason, I was expecting a brighter, less tolerable colour when I saw what they'd named it, but it's sort of surprising that I didn't know better since I've done more than eighty of these colour tests now and it's pretty common for the colour names to not elicit the right mental picture.

I didn't do a great job of striking the Electric Yellow in small spacers, but since I never make small beads, that won't ever matter to me very much. In all of the other beads, I had no trouble striking it at all - it seemed to happen naturally just by working it.

The irritating thing about Striking Yellow is that it looks exactly the same as a lot of other colours that aren't yellow. For instance, it's sort of hard to tell Electric Yellow apart from Clear unless you've melted the end of it, and it's almost impossible to tell it apart from Striking Red, too. This can make a torching session a little like a game of Russian Roulette if you aren't careful about keeping track of where you put stuff down. The very first thing I do now when I 'm working with this colour (or Striking Red) is melt one end of the rod slightly and tease a strike out of it, and then use that end as the handle from then on (AFTER it cools. OUCH!) so that no accidents happen.

Electric Yellow does the same thing opaque yellows do when you add silver to it, which is turn brown. Silver leaf on top of Electric Yellow goes very brown, almost black in places, with some silvery bits crusting on the surface. Encasing this reaction predictably nets silver and brown under clear.

Silver glass is surprisingly nice on Electric Yellow, or at least the reducing silver glass frit was. The TerraNova2 frit didn't seem to get a very good strike on the face of the beads, but on the edges where it naturally cooled more, it is nicer. This tells me that the lack of colour here is MY fault. The reducing silver glass frit looks really neat, sort of blending together and forming those funky yellow lines around its edges.

Blech. This is the result of making frit stringer with Electric Yellow and reducing silver glass frit, using that to encase a bead made from Electric Yellow and then encasing with Clear. Not attractive at all, although some of the effects inside are interesting to look at.

Copper Green and Electric Yellow are also surprisingly nice together. I particularly like the side of the bead where the Electric Yellow is on top of the Copper Green. There is not much in the way of reaction on the Striking Yellow side of the bead, although the Copper Green does have an interesting sheen to it and is noticeably paler and faded around the edges of the dots and stringer lines. The light line that has formed around the Electric Yellow dots and stringer lines on the right-hand side of the bead are more interesting, and really just sort of cool. Like.

  

And then Electric Yellow just sort of stopped being interesting. Ivory and Peace separate on it a little bit, but honestly, that happens with a lot of colours so it's hard to get excited about. There is really not much of a reaction between Opal Yellow and Electric Yellow at all.

I didn't really make a lot of beads with Electric Yellow because I was afraid (unnecessarily, as it turns out) that it would be stupidly reactive and wreak havoc with the other colours I was using, but I did make this rose cane. The cane is Electric Yellow and a hand-mixed yellow that I made by combining Orange Sherbet and Dark Ivory in roughly equal proportion.