Test Results :: Cranberry

CiM Cranberry is a deep, rich fuschia colour and a nice, dense transparent pink.  Deciding whether I prefer this colour or if I prefer Effetre Rubino Oro is sort of difficult, because I like them both for different reasons.  I will talk about some of the similarities and differences as we move down through my test beads.

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

Cranberry is a deeper, richer colour than Rubino Oro -- or at least, this particular batch of Cranberry is/was deeper and richer in colour than the batch of Rubino Oro that I had back in 2012 when I made my Rubino Oro test beads.

Silver does fascinating things on top of Cranberry. You can see in the bead on the left how the silver has gone green and yellow and brown on top of it. In the right-most bead, you can see how the silver foil I sandwiched between two layers of cranberry has turned a vivid pinkish orange colour.

The first bead where I melted silver leaf into the surface resulted in the same green/yellow/brown reaction that I got with Rubino, but in the second bead where I reduced and encased the silver, the silver stayed much more 'silver' than it did when I performed the same test with Rubino.  It is possible that I may have used a different clear, though, so I will try to do a better job of keeping track of that in future. In the Rubino Oro bead, the silver turned pink and yellow under the encasement.

I don't think that encasing Cranberry is an especially good idea.  The bead in the middle has cranberry, then a layer of silver leaf, and then was reduced and encased with Clear. It has cracked right down the middle.

In these beads, you can see what an interesting base colour cranberry is for silver glass. Both my reducing and striking silver glass frit got all interesting on top of this colour. I got beautiful, vivid colour from the TerraNova2 frit in the bead on the right, and in the bead on the left, the reducing silver glass frit developed interesting separation lines and halos and also left some blue fume on the surface of the Cranberry.

When I did these tests with Rubino Oro, I got funny brownish gunkiness around the edges of my reduction frit, and the colours in both test beads were much more washed-out looking, although the TerraNova2 frit got good colour on top of Rubino as well.

So, this picture is a bit confusing because I stupidly put the colours on the bead in the wrong order in the bead on the right, mixing up the placement of Opal Yellow and Ivory. Since I made these beads and took these pictures sometime last year, I don't still have the beads lying around to take another picture, so you will need to use your imagination to see things in the right order. It is in the bead on the right that the order is screwed up.

Tuxedo didn't react with the Cranberry or vice versa.

Cranberry caused my Copper Green, Opal Yellow, Ivory and Peace to separate when I used those colours on top of it to make stringer dots and lines.

In addition to separating Ivory, Cranberry also turns it brown, although sort of differently from how I experienced this reaction with Rubino Oro. While in my Rubino test results, Rubino turned brownish on top of Ivory, when I used Cranberry on top of Ivory I got dramatic dark, brownish black splotches that took over that part of the bead. In my Rubino test results, when I used Ivory on top of Rubino, the Ivory went completely brown. With Cranberry, only the edges of the Ivory turned brown, and in a kind've neat, fuzzy, watercolour way.

Using Copper Green and Opal Yellow underneath Cranberry stringer dots and lines caused the base glass to pop up in halos around the Cranberry. Like with Rubino, the Cranberry spreads out on top of these colours, however it does not thin out as much as Rubino so the effect is not as subtle.

I didn't get the same kind of popping halo effect with Peace, which would have surprised me more if I hadn't already had that same result with Rubino Oro.

This is an appalling bead, because it got stuck to something else in the kiln and has gouges in the belly, however it demonstrates very nicely the richness of this colour. You can sort of see in the breasts that the colour is blueish, and I'm not sure what caused this. It is more pronounced in person and has a weird, cloudy quality to it.  It happened on both the breasts and on her butt (not shown) and the only thing I can think of is that those places on her got a little less striking than the rest of the sculpture did.

Test Results :: Intense Black

Intense Black is classified as a transparent, but it looks pretty opaque in anything I have ever used it in. It is a super-saturated colour, and makes beautifully crisp black stringer design on top of every colour I've tried.

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

If you get Intense Black really, really hot after using a small amount of it on top of another colour, it will web like crazy.  I intentionally did not do that thing in any of these test beads, to try to see if I could also get Intense Black to behave nicely and NOT spread around.  As it turns out, without any particular skill or practice necessary, it is easy to control this aspect of Intense Black.

Silver sort of disperses and disappears on top of Intense Black, but when the silver is reduced and encased, you can see in the bead on the right that it forms a shiny, metallic silver layer under the clear.

Intense Black makes an unexpectedly good base for silver glass. My striking silver glass frit bloomed nicely, and the reduction frit looks pretty nice as well.

And here you can see how dark and crisp the intense black lines are over the other test colours. The bead on the left doesn't show any real reaction between colours.

In the bead on the left, the opposite seems to be true. Copper Green separates so that it is pink and crusty around the edges but then turquoise and 3-dimensional-looking in the centres.

Ivory separates and develops a fine line down the middle of lines and a fine dot in the middle of dots when it is used over Intense Black.

When Peace is used over Intense Black, the Intense Black bleeds into it, making it look murky.

Test Results :: Ghee

This interesting colour is CiM Ghee.  It is a striking colour that deepens and darkens in colour the more you strike it, changing from a yellow just slightly brighter than Effetre Yellow Opalino (but just as translucent) to a rich, amber/caramel opal colour after repeated heating and cooling cycles.

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

The main differences between Yellow Opalino and Ghee are:

• Ghee strikes to a more opaque/opal dark caramel colour, where Yellow Opalino strikes to become more opaque, but doesn't really change colour.
• The two glasses have different reactions with other colours, even though their reactions with silver and with Ivory are mostly the same.
  

The reactions that Ghee has with silver are also fairly similar to the reactions with silver that I experienced with Yellow Opalino. Silver turns a strange pinkish brown colour when used on top of Ghee, and when the silver is reduced and encased, it forms a pink and silver blanket that is iridescent under the clear.
 

So, with silver glass, I didn't have anything really exciting happen with Ghee.  In the leftmost bead, you can see that the Ghee has gone darker and more caramelly and it's not really clear to me whether this happened because I reduced the bead and it struck as a result of temperature change or if it was because of the silver in the silver glass frit.

I didn't get great results from my striking silver glass frit on top of Ghee, either, but please keep in mind that I am terrible at striking silver glass and that really the point of that test is to find the base colours where the glass does all the work and I just have to watch the magic. Ghee is not one of those base colours.

In the rightmost bead, I used frit stringer which I created by dipping Ghee into my silver glass reduction frit and pulling it out into thick stringer. Then, I wrapped that frit stringer around a core of Ghee and encased the whole mess with Clear. I got pretty colours, but overall I am not very pleased with the effect because with Ghee it is sort of ragged. I also didn't get all of the Ghee covered, and the yellow of the Ghee doesn't really go all that well with the blue and green of the frit. Since it's sort of hard to get 100% encasement coverage with stringer, I prefer to use this technique with colours that coordinate more nicely so that mistakes don't look as awful.
 

With Tuxedo, Ghee doesn't really do anything interesting. There is no reaction when Tuxedo is used on top of it and it largely disappears on top of Tuxedo.

With Copper Green, a light turquoise line appears wherever Copper Green and Ghee touch. You can see that the copper green has separated into bands of light and dark turquoise and that in some places, a dark line also formed. I don't know what caused that and it didn't happen consistently, so more experimentation would be required to be able to provide more information about that.

Ghee makes Opal Yellow separate. When Ghee is used on top of Opal Yellow, a faint halo of Opal Yellow pops up around it. When Opal Yellow is used on top of Ghee, a translucent line appears in the middle of Opal Yellow stringer lines and translucent, darker dots form in the middle of Opal Yellow dots.

Ivory and Ghee have a dark line reaction that is more pronounced when Ivory is used on top of Ghee, but still evident the other way around. Because Ghee is translucent, on top of Ivory it looks grey because of this reaction. A very strange colour of grey, too.

The reaction that occurs between Peace and Ghee is very similar to what happens with Opal Yellow only much less dramatic. Also, because Ghee is translucent, when layered on top of Peace it becomes a super-bright yellow.

Here is a goddess made with Ghee. It's my first sculptural piece with Ghee, and I can see that making anything nice with it using it this way would require some practice in order to get it to strike uniformly, or in order to spot-strike it intentionally. You can see here, though, the dramatic colour change that can be achieved through repeated heating and cooling.