Paper Marbling

The Eagan Art House hosts a "Mystery Art Night" occasionally. For about $20/person, you show up and do some sort of art project for 2-3 hours. We thought it would be a fun date night, and signed up, not sure what to expect. I had images of painting and jewelrymaking. Troy had flashes of clay and sketching. We got something neither of us had ever heard of and never done before: paper marbling.

 Marbling is apparently an old art form, a trade secret held by guilds. Every marbled paper is unique, and this was a good way to ensure things were originals. The process is fairly straightforward, and the results are all beautiful in unique ways.

 The basic process is: splatter acrylic paint onto a viscous liquid, and watch as the colors form beautiful patterns. Use wood sticks or combs to create more intricate patterns.

 In more detail, the viscous liquid is called a carragenan (sp?), made up of water and powder from Irish moss, a seaweed (I'm sort of hazy on the details). Acrylic paint is made with powder and water. Brushes are made with plastic bristles from brooms - gather 50 bristles and tie them together to make a brush. Load up one end of the bristles with paint and shake or tap the paint end on top of the bath of liquid. The paint spots disperse as soon as they hit the liquid. The first color spreads quite a lot. The second color pushes the first color, and the third the first two. Eventually, the first color ends up as "veins."

 I took some pictures to document my process.

 I first used a burgundy color as my veins. They spread quite a lot, as you can see.

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I used a light brown next. This pushed the burgundy out into the distinctive veins look.

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I then added a light pink, now you can see both the previous colors:

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The instructor had told us to use lots of colors - up to 10 or 20! But for my first one I didn't want to do too much.

 I added some purple. By now, my 4th color, the colors weren't spreading very much and just staying the way they landed in the liquid.

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If I had stopped at this point and put the paint to paper, I probably would have gotten what's called the "stone" design. It looks a lot like the natural veins in a marble or other stone.

 I tried to add some yellow for a complementary color, but it was getting hard to see:

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Different colors would also behave differently. I had ones added later on that suddenly spread and pushed everything aside, which would almost "ruin" the look, except it's virtually impossible to have something not look good.

 I tried to add a bit of dark green:

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Seeing that the colors weren't moving much, I decided this was a good stopping point. Instead of making a stone pattern, I decided to try a few other things.

 The first thing to do is to use a wooden skewer and move it through the paints back and forth. This is the pattern you get:

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(Obviously, you can vary how closely each iteration of the skewer gets).

 Then you go the other way, creating this really fine, feathered, zig-zag look (there's an official word I don't know):

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The next step is to take a fine-tooth comb and comb perpendicular to what you just did.

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These colors really start to come out :) Then, I was trying to go for a peacock type shape, though I didn't quite do it right. I basically combed through with a super wide tooth comb (like, maybe 2 inches between each tooth?) in an s-shaped curve pattern.

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Lastly, I took a piece of paper that had been primed with a type of alum and placed it on top of the pattern. Most of it got transferred over, and I had to gently rinse the alum off before setting the paper to dry. This was the end result:

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This was the only pattern I chronicled from beginning to end (after all, I wanted time to make them!). I did take a quick snap of one before I put it to paper, a lovely peacock one that hasn't dried yet so I don't have the final paper:

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Here are some of the ones Troy and I did:

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Troy did all of the above, I did this next one. I still have 2 that are drying at the art house. For this one, I wanted to do some peacock colors, but I stopped and didn't comb through.

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