Manic Material Marbling or Taking Textiles to Textured Treasures

These first two pieces are traditional stone patterns just whisking down layers of color. They both have a look of background to me with water or sky and trees. The first looks like water lillies from a distance (at least to me).

Ya gotta double click on these to see the detail and they aren't even ironed yet!




Well, fabric all ironed and ready to go for another day of marbling and experimenting. Of course, the first experiments were dead wrong but you often learn more from those than the ones that work. So the first couple of pieces are so-so, but oh so easy to cut up! For the past week or so, I have been concentrating on the compression technique for getting good organic looking pieces with lots of color. The compression technique I have been using is to take a piece of foam board the width of the tray (so you can fit it inside) and drag it across the size carefully starting at one edge. If it skips a bit, that just makes it more interesting. No rocket science here. I have also used a small piece of balsa wood as well.

So what I found out today was:


(1) you can get more color on top of the size by using the whisks than with the eye dropper no matter how careful you are,


(2) the more color the better for the compression technique as part of the fun is the blooming up of colors that had dropped to the bottom when squeezed out by the more aggressive later paints. When they are still attached by that thin thread, the colors will follow the thread up to the top again and you get great organic patterns.


(3) don't stroke across the colors more than once as mud ensues pretty quickly.


(4) make sure you have a good variety of values.


(5) if you have a surface that looks icky because of some of the colors dropping and being mishapen, you have the perfect surface for using the compression technique.


(6) if you have managed to get a lot of color on top of the size and you have used the compression technique, you can usually get at least two prints -- even got three from one. The prints look nothing alike!


These two prints were the first and second taken from one tray without adding any color in between.





These two were also the result of taking two prints from the same tray without doing anything in between. Notice the second has a lot more red which has more room to spread now that the first print took up most of the blue and green.