Marbling Experimentation!

Hello :)

My marbling kit came in last week (I had to order it online), so I decided to experiment with it a little bit on paper. I used some old sketchbook paper for this first experimentation, but soon I'll be trying it out on different mediums, including different types of paper and fabric (cotton). This first experimentation was mostly focused on learning how to use the marbling kit and seeing how the dyes worked.

I followed Nikki's instructions to use the marbling kit, while also reading what came with the package. The dye can be difficult to work with, so one must create a sort of system for using it. You need to attain a tub that's a bit larger than the object to be marbled and put some water in it (somewhere around 1-2 inches deep). After this, you can usually put the dyes on the water and swirl it around a little bit, but this makes it difficult if the dye drops down to the bottom of the water since the object won't pick up this dye. The kit comes with some "float paper" which is basically a bunch of little circles of cardboard-like material that will float on the surface of the water. You can then pour the dye on these to make it easier to control the flow and movement of the colors. You can also use a brush (as Nikki suggests) to sort of paint on the water to get the dye on the surface. The brush is also useful for creating the pattern, but you can also blow on the water to move more of the colors more subtly. Once the desired pattern is obtained, the object is then gently laid on top of the water to soak up the colors (but this object should not go beneath the surface of the water, as I learned the hard way). After this, the material can be set to dry and you're done, unless you want to create other effects, which I will discuss later.

During my experimentation, I used colors that I didn't plan on using for my final product (green, orange and yellow). Unfortunately, I didn't take as many pictures as I wanted to and those that I have doon't have the best quality, but at least this was just an experiment for now. Below are two examples of how the colors look when submerged on the water.

In the first photo, you can kind of see how some of the dye dropped down to the bottm. In the second, I used the float paper to get the colors on the top. Below are a few marbled materials.

There's some white space in these since I didn't fully cover the paper in the dye, and also some "smudginess" that resulted from either dropping the paper in too deep or touching the paper before it dried. I started to figure it out more in this last example shown here, although this one is a little boring since I didn't stir around the colors. I had another example that turned out pretty cool, however it turned into a sort of brownish color since I accidentally dropped it in the water too deep and the colors mixed. I'm planning on working with this soon again and trying this out on some fabric as well. I'll discuss the other cool techniques that can be done with this in my next post before this one gets too long.

Thanks for reading, and apologies for the poor picture quality again.

Larissa :)