Search This Blog

May 6, 2010

Test Results :: Dark Grass Green

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

General Impressions
This is not the first time that I've whined about this, but I wish that there was a naming standard for glass so that when a colour was being called 'Dark' there was some rational basis in fact for someone having thought that it was dark. Effetre Dark Grass Green is, in my opinion, of medium saturation (NOT dark). It is not as saturated as Dark Teal, but more saturated than Light Teal.  It's not even a little bit Teal, of course, but hopefully you get what I'm saying.

This colour (or at least my batch of it) has a tendency to splinter.  Shocking and splintering are similar behaviour, both due to thermal shock, but splintering is more irritating because the pieces that come off the rod aren't usable, and tend to fly backwards and attach themselves to the skin of my right hand.  It's also fairly soft for a transparent, and a little prone to boiling if you get it too hot.

Dark Grass Green is not a particularly reactive colour, but it is sort of interesting with silver and silver glass.

Reduction
Nothing exciting happens when you reduce Dark Grass Green all by itself. (Bead #2)

Reactions

On top of Dark Grass green, silver leaf seems to web out a little and coalesce into little dots.  There are a few places on the bead where the silver has taken on a blue-ish hue, which is interesting.  Reduced and under Clear, silver leaf on Dark Grass Green forms a shiny silver coating.  It's not super iridescent under there, but you can tell that it's metal, and the edges of the silver coating have a faintly blue-ish hue to them.


Dark Grass Green makes a surprisingly good base for striking silver glass.  I got great colour out of my TerraNova2 frit, anyway.  I wasn't quite as impressed with what the reducing silver glass frit did on top of it, and I don't have any spectacular fuming results to report the way I did with Great Bluedini.

In Bead #8, I took Dark Grass Green, dipped it in silver glass 'reduction frit', and pulled it out into stringer.  Then, I wrapped it around a base of Tuxedo and encased it in Clear.  The reason I did this was because I've had interesting results with colours like Light Brown Transparent and Pale Green Apple making frit stringer this way... I didn't have such great luck with the Dark Grass Green.  In the future, I'll be coring this test bead with the test colour rather than a black.

In Bead #3, I took a core of Tuxedo, wrapped it in silver foil and then encased it in Dark Grass Green without first melting in the silver.  My intent was to keep the silver intact under Dark Grass Green, but I clearly got the bead too hot for that.  The reason I did this test is because I wanted to see what colour the silver would be underneath the Dark Grass Green, and I think I got my answer in some of the little dots.  It's silver... just greenish because of the green glass.  When you encase silver with some colours, it turns yellow or brown, but this colour doesn't make it do that.

 

Neither White nor Ivory have any interesting reaction with Dark Grass Green (White is on the left, Ivory on the right).  The most interesting thing about these two beads is how LIGHT the Dark Grass Green looks on top of them.

I haven't managed to make any beads worth showing that feature Dark Grass Green, so I'm just going to end this here. 

No comments:

Post a Comment