1 - Plain, 2 - Plain (reduced), 3 - w/ Silver Leaf, 4 - w/ Silver Leaf (reduced & encased), 5 - w/ TerraNova2 Frit, 6 - w/ Silver Glass Frit (reduced), 7 - w/ Tuxedo, 8 - w/ Copper Green, 9 - w/ Opal Yellow, 10 - w/ Ivory, 11 - w/ Peace
So... this Neptune stuff. It's a newish handpulled colour from Effetre, also going by the Italian name of Verde Rame Metallico - or Copper Green Metallic, for those of us who do not speak Italian.
Neptune seems to be a name that Frantz Art Glass has created themselves, and while I am not a huge fan of different vendors naming the same colour of glass different things, I think Neptune is a damned good name for this colour and if I owned Effetre I might wish I'd thought of it myself.
Neptune is definitely a colour that some of us will love and some of us will not, however I am firmly in the love camp on this one. I can't resist the glasses that have 'interesting' finishes, and the odd, shiny-yet-matte finish of this glass kills me. It is also full of weirdness which I am attracted to in the same way that ants are attracted to picnics.
Neptune, after you encase it, is not metallic at all. It is a beautiful dark teal colour, somewhat reminiscent of CiM Mermaid without the streakiness. Neptune is a lot freakier than Mermaid though, and seems so super-saturated that I half-expect the rods to leave a greenish stain on anything they touch.
Sadly, Neptune is not so interesting with silver... but then, none of the coppery green colours seem to care about silver much. You can see, however, that in the bead on the left the finish of the Neptune is a little more red than it is in the other beads below, with some fine yellow/green webbing on the surface, and that in the bead where I reduced and encased the silver leaf, it's turned a queer shade of yellow.
Neptune is a good base for silver glass, the colour having developed quite weill in my TerraNova2 frit, but being so shiny itself it doesn't much need any shiny reducing silver glass decoration. The bead on the right just looks a little messy.
Copper Green and Tuxedo don't really react with one another, which is useful information because this is a pretty reactive colour. I think they are attractive together, since the Neptune really shines when paired with something to provide some negative space. It's also interesting, because Tuxedo has tended to bleed with a lot of the other greens I've used it with.
This bead that features Neptune with Copper Green is just sort of ugly. The Copper Green is mostly subsumed by the Neptune, with just a few splotches standing out.
I got the Neptune pretty hot in this bead and was "rewarded" with some random pitting in the Neptune portion of the bead. Neptune bleeds into Opal Yellow in the centre of this bead and at other random points through the Opal Yellow stringer design.
Love this. On top of Ivory, Neptune is very self-contained, very shiny and has a very pronounced darkness at the edges of it. Ivory on top of Neptune is not quite so nice, the Ivory slightly separating and getting sort of 'eaten' by the Neptune, with big brown bites taken out of the stringer lines and dots as the Neptune webs its way around. In the centre of this bead, the Neptune has consumed part of the real estate originally reserved for Ivory with a very pronounced dark brown webbing. This bead makes me really happy.
With Peace, Neptune is more intermittently shiny, and you can see that it has bled into the Peace in the centre of the bead. The Peace dots and stringer lines on top of Neptune seem thinned out and cloudy around the edges.
So, to summarize. This colour rocks. The test beads are one thing, but making real beads with this colour is hugely fun. A small drawback is that, like many handpulled colours, Neptune can be a little shocky. I can live with it.
Fun beads with Neptune:
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