Wednesday 21 September 2016

Easy Marbling

Stir the water before adding marbling ink to create a swirl pattern.





These pieces of paper are not as impressive as I'd like. No end papers of antique books commissions for me! But they are good enough for gift wrapping and collage and they were certainly quick and easy to do.

I bought some marbling inks called 'Easy marble' by Marabu. You put some water into a washing up bowl drip some ink into the water and lay a piece of white A4 copy paper on top of the water and peel it off and lay it out to dry. That's it. The inks form a sort of plastic film on the water which is transferred onto your paper.  I added ordinary coloured inks. They just sank to the bottom and didn't transfer to the paper.

My only problem with these Marabu inks is that you can't manipulate them ie. drag a comb across or make patterns with a toothpick. As soon as you start to do this the colour 'film' clumps and sticks together. But after some experimenting I found if I swirled the water before adding the inks i got more of a pattern (top picture.)

I've added a bit of gold to each piece of marbling now and they look more expensive. I found that if I used several different inks the results weren't as good as only using two coloured inks. I wonder if those brown papier mache boxes will take the colour like paper does? I'll let you know. Brown paper would be worth a try too. 

A quick word of warning - don't use your only washing up bowl as I did. The ink colours won't come off...

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