Reducing colors-do they all?

simvet02 · #1 2007-12-30, 8:51pm

Are their certain color rods, no matter what brand that reduce or produce unique affects?

I am using COE 104 rods from Fireworks and was putting a lite blue opaque stringer on an ivory base and I noticed that the blue has a fine black line on each side of it. Is this a reaction of some kind?

thanks,

Jan Thompson
Newbie on a Hot Head

Carolyn M · #2 2007-12-30, 9:04pm

Yes it is. There are so many, I'm terrible at typing them all out, Emily is the queen at explaining all these! Try doing a search on this forum

Carolyn M · #3 2007-12-30, 9:08pm

Found a good explanation from Heather - I hope she doesn't mind me pasting it here. BTW, reduction and reaction are two different things, reaction is a reaction between glass colours, reduction is the type of flame used to draw the metals to the surface of the glass.

""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!""
__________________
HOG Beadartist Gallery Hearts of Glass Etsy Store

simvet02 · #4 2007-12-30, 9:29pm

Thanks Carolyn, thats just what I needed. I love what it did, have just a small end of the light blue left and now know I want to make stringers out of it.

Jan

ROC · #5 2007-12-30, 9:40pm

Jan, btw, with the reaction you're getting, the line where the two glasses meet will be crisp and fine or fat and fuzzy, depending on how much heat you use.

simvet02 · #6 2008-01-01, 6:51am

Thanks Rachel, I tried another one last night and it turned out so pretty. I need to stop with all of this experimenting until I learn to make a decent bead though....

Jan

Listenup · #7 2008-01-01, 10:59am

Looks like you're off to a good start!

As I recall (and I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) the Fireworks rods are actualy Effetre. Lots of folks sell Effetre so if you find a certain color you like, you don't have to buy the whole assortment that Fireworks offers. It looks to me like you used Dk Ivory (could be regular Ivory, but it looks like Dk on my monitor) and Sky Blue.

If you're getting yours from Hobby Lobby, be sure to check for the 40% off coupon that's on their website quite frequently. This week it's for spray paint, but it changes weekly.

Oh, and Welcome!

simvet02 · #8 2008-01-01, 11:05am

Thanks, I had no idea I could get them at Hobby Lobby. I just ordered some of both Ivorys from Frantz. I got a few others that I liked also. But in a pinch its nice to know that HL has them.

Jan

Listenup · #9 2008-01-01, 6:55pm

They have an assortment pack, but sometimes you have to go with what you can get.

Have fun playing!!!

Emily · #10 2008-01-02, 4:51pm

Ooooh, Carolyn paid me a compliment, so now I feel like I have a reputation to live up to.

She really said what needed to be said, but just for grins, here's some stuff I pasted together from more-or-less recent threads on reacting/reducing colors and such things:

Quote:

Reactive isn't a technical term. There's no formal definition, and it may mean different things to different people. Basically, I think, if the glass looks the same on the bead as it does when it's still in rod form, it's not reactive. If it does something different when it comes into contact with other colors of glass, it's reactive. There are, however, different types of reactions.

Glass is colored with metal oxides. Glass made with copper reacts with glass made with sulphur. A dark line forms where the two meet. In Effetre (Moretti), copper colors (opaques) are turquoise, sky blues (dark and light) petroleum green, and grass green. Sulphur colors are dark and light ivory, yellow, coral, orange, and red. If you put a turquoise stripe on ivory, it will look like you put a very thin black stripe between them.

Some opaque colors react by separating a little bit. An opacifier -- a substance used to make a transparent color opaque -- is added to the glass, and sometimes colors separate, so you'll get a dot or stripe of deeper, more transparent color surrounded by cloudier lighter color. Why they do this when placed next to certain other colors is beyond me, but it happens.

Striking is when a color makes a color change when heated. In Effetre, transparent red, yellow, and orange are striking colors. The rods are light (often amber) before they're heated, and change to the final color in the flame. If you overheat them, they can lose the color and go back to the unstruck shade. Sometimes you can restrike, and sometimes not. Tongue pink, powder pink, purple 254 (EDP, or evil devitrifying purple) and rubino are also striking colors.

(...)

The Effetre (Moretti) striking transparents, which include red, yellow, rubino, and probably orange, will go foggy and translucent, almost opaque, if you overheat them. (The reason for the "probably" on the orange is that I don't think I even own any transparent orange. I hate orange and rarely use it. The rods that I have are translucent to start with, so I'm not sure if they're really transparent striking orange or something else.) Rubino (a/k/a Gold Pink or Gold Ruby or Cranberry Pink) is actually a little less likely to go cloudy than the red and the yellow. Getting the temperature hot enough to work the glass, but not so hot that it goes cloudy, can be quite an exercise. I'll admit I screw it up about 95% of the time, so I almost never use Effetre transparent red. There's a Lauscha red that I find much more reliable. Effetre transparent red can also go brownish and livery. (Did you ever see dried blood that's sort of separated? No? Well, then, you're lucky.) The Lauscha is less likely to do that.

There's no substitute for rubino, so you just have to work it fairly cool. Make sure your flame isn't reducing, or it can go gray. For Hot Head users, this translates to working it fairly far out in the flame, because the closer you are to the torch head, the more reducing your flame will be.

Rubino is a very dense color. Because of that, the rods of rubino are actually a core of clear with a layer of rubino over it, kind of like reverse filigrana. Sometimes you can see the two layers if you look straight at the end of the rod. This can cause problems when you're making dots with rubino. It helps to pull stringer by heating up a gather, taking another piece of rubino and attaching it as a handle, mixing up the gather really well so you blend the clear in with the color, and then pulling your stringer.

I hear it is possible to burn the color out of rubino if you overheat it way too much, so you don't want to blast it.

(...)

Reduction is exposing the bead to a flame that's more fuel (propane) than oxygen. Flames are more reducing nearest the head of the torch, neutral in the middle, and oxidizing farthest out. When you're working on a fuel/air torch like a HotHead, bringing the bead closer to the head of the torch is one way to put it into a flame that's more reducing (although the flame on a HotHead tends to be a little on the reducing side anyway). If you want a really reducing flame on a HotHead, people have worked out ways to cover the air intake ports temporarily. As far as I know, nobody's come up with a way to make the flame on a HotHead really oxidizing.

A neutral flame is hotter than either a reducing flame or an oxidizing flame, although it doesn't always seem like it.

Striking is the color change in the glass. Generally, the way to use a striking glass is to heat it, take it out of the flame to let it cool, then re-introduce it to the flame carefully and reheat until you see the color change. The reason that you reintroduce at the top of the flame is that it's cooler out there, so you're not sticking the cooled glass right into the hottest part of the flame. You bring the glass toward you slowly, watching as it heats up until you see the color change. You don't want to reheat the glass to glowing after you've struck it because it will lose the color and you'll have to restrike.

Definitely more than you asked, but stuff you'll probably want to know at some point.

Why stop experimenting? All you're doing is playing with a little color. You can do that and practice making bead shapes at the same time. I guess some people have the discipline to make a hundred one-color round beads until they could make them perfectly, but I never did. Way too boring! OK, so it probably took me twice as long to learn to make a decent round bead . . .

Samyel · #11 2008-01-02, 5:00pm

Just jumping in to say that this thread is fantastically useful. Thank you!

I think I'm going to need to buy more ivory...

simvet02 · #12 2008-01-02, 5:11pm

Emily, thanks so much for all the condensed learning. It would have taken me years to figure all that out. I printed it out and will tape it above my workspace, er, well maybe next to my workspace as I might catch it on fire it its in front of me.

And I'm with you on the orange, unfortunately when I got the kit I ordered a set of rods that Delphi had on sale and it was a whole set of red, orange, and yellows. All of my firest beads are these colors as I try and get rid of the rods. Not colors I would ever normally work with but I must say I sure didn't mind wasting them learning.

Thanks again,
Jan
Still making red and orange beads

Emily · #13 2008-01-07, 1:02pm

Don't use up all your red and orange! I actually found myself buying more orange at one point. You'll need little bits of those colors for contrast from time to time. If you decide to do florals, you might want to make stamen cane, or just poke your flower centers with a yellow or orange stringer. It's useful to have a little bit around.

EaglesLegacy · #14 2009-07-20, 6:55pm

This is such a useful thread. Exactly what I was looking for. I do have a question. Is there any way of knowing what family (copper or sulfer) a color belongs to without having to refer to a list?

Listenup · #15 2009-07-20, 8:53pm

You'll get so that the colors you like and use all the time, you can pretty much know. If there is a specific color you want to know about, make a small spacer bead out of turquoise (copper) or yellow (sulfur). Melt in a little dot of the color in question. If you get an outline, then the color in question contains the opposite. I didn't suggest using ivory as one of your test colors because so many things react with it.

EaglesLegacy · #16 2009-07-20, 11:33pm

That's a good idea. Glass is a much larger learning curve than I would have ever imagined. It's also the first artistic medium that I am absolutely addicted to, and I've tried nearly everthing out there.

ewdb · #17 2009-07-23, 9:08am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Emily

Ooooh, Carolyn paid me a compliment, so now I feel like I have a reputation to live up to.

She really said what needed to be said, but just for grins, here's some stuff I pasted together from more-or-less recent threads on reacting/reducing colors and such things:

Definitely more than you asked, but stuff you'll probably want to know at some point.

Why stop experimenting? All you're doing is playing with a little color. You can do that and practice making bead shapes at the same time. I guess some people have the discipline to make a hundred one-color round beads until they could make them perfectly, but I never did. Way too boring! OK, so it probably took me twice as long to learn to make a decent round bead . . .

excellent post!!

...and i'm with you re the experimenting - i learned the most from my mistakes and/or when i was just playing with various colours and shapes at the torch. if someone ever tried to sit me down to make single colour donut beads over and over again i'd run screaming from the studio