Exciting this week as the kids tried their hands at marbling – with some always unexpected, beautiful results.
Marbling is an ancient technique of paper decoration, in which paint is dropped into the ‘size’ which is water thickened with a special powder. (traditionally a type of seaweed). Because of this thickener the paint sits on top of the surface of the water and from there it’s possible to take a print. Before you do that though you can manipulate the paint on the surface into amazing patterns that often resemble marble, hence the name.
Often the simplest methods work the best with marbling – not too many colours, not too much swirling. The traditional way is very methodical (drop colours in, feather them across then up and down, then spread a comb through them all) but you can get get lovely effects with none of that precision – in fact, sometimes just dropping the colours in is all you need, especially for the ones that look like beautiful bacteria in a petri dish.
