[Heather/Ericaceae]

Organics are fun - especially when you're learning because there's no "right" and "wrong"! It's a great way to experiment with how colours react together. Here are some colour theory tips to get you going...

Copper Family: Turquoise, all greens (especially copper green, mosaic green and petroleum green), sky blue, EDP (254 orchid purple), and rubino all have copper, silver, and/or gold in them. They play well with each other no matter how much you heat them (well, the EDP might not always play well but that's because the E stands for EVIL). They also take silver leaf without going black.

Sulfur Family: Ivory, red, yellow, orange, and most browns contain sulfur to make their warm colours. You can mix these colours together as hot as you like and you won't get swampy muck. Silver leaf will darken them quite a lot.

Now, when you mix colours from the Copper and Sulfur families together you get crisp black outlines if you just melt them together. (Ivory and Turquoise look very cool this way!) But if you get them *really* hot for a long time, you get swampy brown muck.

Non-Aligned Family: Violets, cobalt, black, periwinkle, white, gray, and opal yellow are "non-aligned" families and they can mix with any colour without the outline effect.

So if you want to play around with hot swirling a bead it's best to stick with one family and non-aligned colours - OR, add the colour from the opposing family as a final step, so it doesn't have time to react too much.

Intense black is fun to play with in organics - add random stripes over a soft base, like ivory, pea green or periwinkle, and then super-heat it until it starts to spread into delicate veins. Silver leaf or foil is also always very fun - but only use that if you have a very good exhaust fan. Try making silvered ivory stringer and adding that to beads - it looks very rocky! Enamels are fun too, but again, you need great ventilation so any particles that get suspended in the air are sucked away immediately and not breathed in.

Have fun!