Winter Colour Diet :: Session #0

I know, I know.... I am starting this more than two months late. It took a little while (longer than I thought) to recover from Christmas, and then there were some business trips and other assorted nonsense in the way in January and early February. Now, I am buckling down to work and can't wait to explore all of the interesting possibilities that this palette presents.

I'm still cheating a little, though, because I technically made these beads (and some real lookers that I'm not showing you) over a few sessions and just haven't been posting about them. Because that is not the way this was supposed to play out at all, I've labelled this collection of beads "Session 0" and will grudgingly not give myself any credit for those sessions.

I have also now started testing the colours in this palette that had not previously been tested by me, so stay tuned for those as well starting last week! The colours I've focused on first have been Effetre's Apple Blush and Dark Violet (already posted), and Wood Legnos and Spanish Leather (coming soon).

Now, before we get into the beads, a quick palette recap. Here are the colours I designated last year as allowable for use in this restricted palette adventure I am on.  Here is a link to my original post.

EFF Spanish Leather, EFF Striking Orange, EFF Opal Yellow, EFF Kelp, EFF Apple Blush, CiM Slytherin, CiM Shrubbery, EFF Mosaic Green, EFF Copper Green, CiM Mint Lozenge, EFF Dark Violet, CiM Evil Queen, EFF Lizard, EFF Oliva Nera, EFF Wood (Legno), EFF Dark Ivory, EFF Ivory, CiM Peace, CiM Tuxedo, EFF Intense Black, REI Clear, REI Raku, PRC Black Pearl, DHX Kalypso, TAG Absinthe

To reiterate the rules in a nutshell, I can use these and only these, with some very minor exceptions for additives such as goldstone, dichro, and silver (and I have since made myself a further allowance for frit and enamels). I can't make any colour substitutions unless I completely use up my stash of a colour, or I lose all the credit I've given myself towards the end goal of eight consecutive torching sessions using these colours together, and have to reset back to zero. This burns a little, because there are some new CiM Limited Runs that I am dying to try, but I am going to have to restrain myself.

On to the beads!

  

Most of these beads are made with a combination of the following five colours: Spanish Leather, Kelp, Shrubbery, Mint Lozenge, and Evil Queen. In some of the beads I'm posting today I've also used Dark Violet, and in other beads I've added Wood, but these beads have only these five somewhat disharmonious colours. Building these beads, I made a tube bead with stripes on it. Then, I raked the stripes and pressed the bead, finally adding the Mint Lozenge wings on the edges and doing some surface decoration.

This is a whole set of beads made with this colour combination. I've been practicing making smaller beads and practicing dots, and this is the result.

This one has both Wood and Dark Violet in addition to the Spanish Leather, Kelp, Shrubbery, Mint Lozenge, and Evil Queen. I really like the contrast between Mint Lozenge and Spanish Leather.

I love this bead. Here, somehow the colour combination worked just a bit better - possibly because Apple Blush played less of a major role. This one has Spanish Leather, Apple Blush, Shrubbery, Mint Lozenge, Dark Violet, and Evil Queen. I made a big ball of Mint Lozenge and drizzled the other colours around and then stretched it out into a tube bead with gravity before pressing it. Then, I added some additional dots and swirls as decoration.

I'm not sure what possessed me to put Mosaic Green dots on top of Wood, because it was a bit of an aesthetic disaster. It was also, however, really interesting from a reaction standpoint. There is no brown glass in this bead - all of the brown is somehow coming out of the Wood (which is not brown) after reacting with the Mosaic Green (also not brown).

These little focals are made with Spanish Leather, Apple Blush, Shrubbery, Evil Queen, and Wood. I really like the crazy things Wood does when it is used on top of Spanish Leather.

Here I used the same colours as in my set above, but with the addition of Wood.

I think this is my favourite bead of the bunch. The top half of the bead is made with a layered cane I made from Mint Lozenge, Shrubbery, and Slytherin. I love how streaky and mottled the colours came out and will definitely be exploring layered cane a little more in coming months. I also had some fun with the shaping of this bead and have ideas to take that a little further.

Since I've been mucking around with these colours for quite some time now, I am actually out of Dark Violet and have replaced it in the palette with Ink Blue Violet, an odd lot of Effetre Ink Blue which is a little less saturated and a little more blue than Dark Violet.

Test Results :: Dark Violet Transparent

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

Effetre Dark Violet Transparent is a nice, dense transparent colour by Effetre standards, and if you use it in a solid-coloured bead, the resulting bead looks almost black. However, in thin layers, Dark Violet isn't really all that dark at all. If you use it over Ivory or White, it is actually a little washed out, so if you are using it in layered designs, I recommend using a more colourful colour under it (e.g. Pale Pink, Pale Blue, or Pale Purple opaque glass) that has something of its own going on in order to get a more vibrant result.

Dark Violet is reactive, both with silver and other colours, in an interesting, subtle way.

Here you can see that in the bead where I used silver leaf on top of the Dark Violet and just melted it in, the silver all but disappears. When the silver is reduced and encased, it turns silvery and metallic under the clear, but more interestingly, it fumes the base glass next to it so that it is cloudy and a vibrant blue colour.

Silver Glass reduction frit is pretty nice on top of Dark Violet. I really like the way my frit blend worked out on top of it in the bead on the left.

In the bead on the right, I got some strike from my TerraNova2 frit, but it didn't really pop. As usual with this test, don't read too much into it. I do this to find the bases where silver glass effortlessly blooms and Dark Violet is clearly not one of those colours, but that doesn't mean that someone more skilled at striking it than me couldn't get good colour out of it on top of Dark Violet.

I didn't get much in the way of reaction from Tuxedo.  I almost never do with transparent colours.

Copper Green, Opal Yellow, and Peace all separate on top of Dark Violet. Copper Green also separates when Dark Violet is used on top of it, but Opal Yellow and Peace don't seem to. They do, however, both act sort of strangely. You can see in the bead on the right that the Opal Yellow has developed a huge number of purple freckles, obscuring for the most part the dots and lines I drew. I think this is the Dark Violet breaking up on top of it, but it's hard to be sure. In the case of peace, there is a weird crack-like separation line developed between the Ivory and Peace. This has never happened before, so I want to blame it on the Dark Violet but don't really see a way to do that when it is only happening where the Peace meets the Ivory. That reaction is a bit of a mystery.

Ivory spread and curdled on top of Dark Violet. In the bead on the right, Dark Violet seems to have developed a dark line in the middle of the stringer lines I drew, and the Ivory around it looks flecked with pale purple.

Here is a goddess bead made from Dark Violet. You can see how very dark Dark Violet is when used in sculptural way.

These beads also use a little Dark Violet.

 

Test Results :: Apple Blush

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

Effetre Apple Blush is a medium ochre opaque, and apart from a little shockiness in the rod,  it's pretty nice to use. Its consistency is buttery and easy to manipulate, and it is also stiff enough that its nice to sculpt with. This colour is pretty streaky, so it is not great for applications where you want a smooth, uniform colour.

The more you strike Apple Blush, the more orange it gets. This colour is pretty strange, because it starts out a greenish yellow, and then as you work it, it loses its greenish cast and develops a mottled orange blush. You can see throughout the rest of these test beads that there is a lot of colour variation in these beads, depending on how they've been worked.

I wish I could figure out how to keep this colour the sort of electric chartreuse colour that it is when you don't strike it at all.  I have made a few spacers that colour and really liked it, but it seems impossible to keep that colour on a larger piece.

Here you can see that the orange blush is most pronounced right around the silver. I don't really know the reason for this, but am going to guess that silver accelerates whatever this glass does when it strikes. Silver gets a brownish haze around it on top of Apple Blush, and coalesces into a crust on the surface of the bead. When the silver is reduced and encased, it looks blueish and shiny.

I got pretty nice colour from my striking silver glass frit on top of Apple Blush, which would be wonderful if the colour of Apple Blush was a better match for the pinks, purples, and blues that it evoked. In the bead on the right, the reducing silver glass does its thing as well but the colour combination is really off-putting.

On top of Tuxedo, Apple Blush separates and develops a faint, crackly, translucent line in the middle of stringer lines and its dots have a mottled appearance. Apple Blush develops a dark line reaction with Copper Green, and Copper Green spreads out on top of it when its used in stringer dots and lines.

Like Ivory, Apple Blush also forms a dark line reaction with Opal Yellow. Where I used Apple Blush over Opal Yellow, he dark line is an orangey yellow, and the Apple Blush interior has a greenish cast. This is a pretty interesting reaction, and it increases the amount of colour contrast between these two colours considerably when they are used together. Opal Yellow on top of Apple Blush is much less interesting, although you can see in the bead on the left that the Apple Blush looks sort of angry and crackly under the Opal Yellow, which has a faint brownish line around it.

Ivory spreads and separates when it is used on top of Apple Blush.

Here is an Apple Blush goddess bead, which shows the magnitude of colour variation, streakiness, and general weirdness that you can expect from this glass.

Because I'm challenging myself, I tried to use Apple Blush in a number of other beads. Here are some of the results. I'll leave it up to you to decide how successful they were :)