A Day of Marbling!

Dianne, Becky and I got together for a day of marbling.  Becky brought both paper and fabric with her to "play" with.  The middle piece on the drying rack is on paper and the other two pieces are fabric.  Becky attempted with the top piece to copy the colors of the bottom piece. With marbling this is difficult after the size (the liquid on which you marble) gets filled with paint.  You never know what will happen at that point.

The marbling process starts with soaking your fabric in a solution of a gallon of water and somewhere between 4 tbsps and a cup of powdered alum.  Dharma even has you use more alum.  Pro Chem has published two different measures which was the first set above.  A day before you want to marble you need to make up the size.  I have used Methycel (methycellulose).  The proportions are 3 1/2 tbsps per gallon of water with a tbsp of clear ammonia (MUST be clear).  You add the Methylcel very slowly to the water, stirring continuously for about 5 minutes and then intermittently for the next half hour.  You need to keep your paints and the size the same temp so I store them in the same place for that day.  

Next on the day you start, you have to make up your paints in small containers (Becky supplied the plastic containers from yogurt which were perfect).  You mix up about equal amounts of liquid acrylics with water and stir.  Drop to see if they expand on the size.  Do this with all your paints.  I add GAC900 to each of the paints as well -- this is especially for use of acrylics on  fabrics and is from Golden paints.  If they refuse to expand, you can add a drop of Synthrapol -- no more as too much will eventually ruin your size.  Once you get everything set up, the fun begins.  You need to tear up some newspapers (tear from top to bottom as newspaper does have a grain).  This will be used to remove bubbles and any remaining paint from your size between pieces.  You use eye droppers or whisks made from whisk brooms to drop the paints onto the size.

I did a total of ten pieces and some are better than others for sure.  The size got a bit corrupted with too much Sythrapol at some point and so it was more and more difficult to get good crisp prints like this one.

Another of the early prints.

This is probably my favorite technique for some reason.  I drop all the paints and then take a flat piece of cardboard or in this instance a tongue depressor and scrape across the top of the size stretching out the colors.  Then I drop a very contrasting color on top.  I use a lot of paints when I marble.

This is another  using the above technique but after the size had been corrupted so very pastel but I did like it alot!

This is a second print made from the same dropping of colors.  The ladies referred to this as a "ghost" print.  I like it much better than the original which I gifted to Dianne as she liked it better than I did so there is no picture!

This is one of two pieces that utilized previously dyed fabric.  This was a shockingly bright yellow piece.  As the paints are transparent (although I had quite a few opaques yesterday), the color of the under piece shows through.  I used nothing but different shades of blue on this one.

I had several more but the photos were blurry (like this one) so I am not posting them!  They were not my favorites either.

Over all, to me it was a very successful day of marbling.  I very rarely like all the pieces I do!!  Each of these pieces is about 17 x 21 inches.  I use an old photo developing tray that someone gave me and wrap it in a plastic bag so that it doesn't get too colored.