Double Helix Oracle Black is an interesting addition to our black glass options. It is a little freaky to work with, because when you pull it out into stringer it looks blue, not black and it continues to look blue while you are working with it in thin layers but it changes back to black in the kiln.
This colour is a magical base colour for silver and silver glass, and has some very interesting reactions with other colours, but it is not useful for stringerwork because it loses cohesion pretty quickly when it is heated and bleeds into other colours.
Nothing happens to Oracle Black when you reduce it.
Here I decided to test Oracle Black in comparison to CiM Hades and Reichenbach Deep Black to see how it performed as stringer. The base colour of both beads is Oracle White.
Making the bead on the left, I heated it what I consider a 'normal' amount (your normal may vary) and then gave the rightmost bead what I would consider to be a 'ridiculous' amount of heat. As you can see, Reichenbach Deep Black stayed together in both situations, but the Hades and Oracle Black both came apart. The Hades spread less and more evenly than the Oracle Black, which in the bead on the right looks like a black and blue smear. Even in the bead where I thought my heat was 'normal' the Hades and Oracle Black did not entirely stay together.
This means that Deep Black is still my go-to black for when I need the black to behave itself, but as you will see Oracle Black has its own set of superpowers, so I imagine I'll be needing some more of it as well.
The leftmost bead here has silver leaf over Oracle Black, and has turned a mottled blue. It's a very interesting change, and I imagine that there are fun ways to exploit this effect. Reducing and encasing the silver makes it less beautiful, but it remains interesting and silvery under the clear.
In both of these beads, I got very nice reactions from the silver glass. The reducing silver glass got fun curdled edges around it and transmitted some of its silvery haze onto the Oracle Black. In the rightmost bead, I got a nicer-than-usual starting strike from my TerraNova2 frit making me think this colour might be a good catalyst for striking silver glass.
So I spent some time talking about how Oracle Black loses cohesion in that Oracle White example above, but if you look at the bead on the right you can see that it held itself together well on top of these other colours. On top of Copper Green it developed a very odd purple border, but that border is a faint greyish shadow on top of Ivory, Opal Yellow, and Peace.
However, absolutely bonkers things happened when I put Opal Yellow, Ivory, and Peace on top of Oracle Black. The edges of my Copper Green got a little frayed by the Oracle Black base, but click into the image above and get a good look at the edges of the other three colours.
Opal Yellow looks like its edges are curdling, Ivory has a pale, mottled border, and the Peace is positively bizarre, developing a wide pale blue outline around all the stringer dots and lines. I am imagining that some fun could be have with exploiting these reactions in a more intentional way, and I am very curious to see how Oracle Black behaves when used to handmix other colours from it.
I made a couple of other beads with Oracle Black, but unfortunately cannot figure out at this point which ones they were, so I will have to get some more and come back to update this post.
