exhibit A:

I really like that effect and would generally paint the back sides with black, just for aesthetic reasons. After a while, I decided to just clear coat the back sides of the pieces (sometimes polishing backside first, sometimes just clear coating over the milscale if it was something being hung inside).
Generally, I never really paid my attention to the back of pieces after torching considering it wasn't something people would see. As I did more and more pieces with the torch coloring, I realized it made for a pretty cool effect on the side that wasn't polished, but for whatever reason it never really clicked as to what was causing it.
exhibit B:

It finally dawned on me that the effect is being caused by whatever contaminants were on the steel after being taken out of the acid/water solution (i.e. milscale, flash rust, etc). So after playing with a few variables I figured out how to do the marble-ish effect
exhibit C:

Hopefully this will be beneficial to some of you on here. I can't always contribute to the file sharing, but hopefully trying to share some of the finishing techniques will make up the difference


side note - all three have been clear coated prior to taking the picture, so the effect is a little different due to gloss.