How to Marble Paper

Transcript

My wife wrote a poetry book. It’s 15 poems and I’m making her a special handmade version as one of her Christmas presents this year. Now, I’ve made my wife handmade books before and this is one of the ones that I’ve made her, but I’ve never done marbled paper. And I figured marbled paper is just so cool, I wanted to give it a go and try to figure it out. And I found this kit—I’ll link it in the description—that came with everything that you need.

You need something called carrageenan which is basically like a seaweed slurry and you mix it up and it makes a thick liquid and you let this sit overnight. And then this is what it looks like the next day. And you can see there’s a bunch of bubbles in it and you got to get rid of the bubbles. So, this Kodak Photo-Flo—surfactant—is going to help get rid of the bubbles. And I just kind of sprinkled a little bit on top and then I took some newspaper and I was just wiping off the bubbles at the top. And I think you could probably put this in like a vacuum chamber and that would also get the bubbles out really fast. But I just went back and forth for a little bit with the newspaper.

And then you add your inks. So, these are acrylic inks that came with the set. This isn’t necessarily miniature painting related, but I do use this ink set and these like inks in general. I have a bunch of different inks that I use for miniature painting—kind of interchangeably. But for this, I’m just going to be using them for how they’re intended—for paper marbling.

And so you just drip in the color that you want. I’m going for a kind of like a dark, mysterious, colorful look. I don’t necessarily have a look in mind, but I want it to look kind of like the cosmos. So I’m dropping in purples, and you can see I’m dropping from higher up and I’m dropping really close, and each one does something different. So, they’re kind of like pushing each other out. And then I’m using this white to push the purple out a little bit more.

What you’ll see me do in a second is—I grabbed some black. And that black—it doesn’t play nicely. It doesn’t float like the other ones do. So then I’m going to get frustrated and put a little bit of surfactant in the black and then I’m going to just kind of mix it up. So basically, there’s a little dance you do when you’re creating a marble like this. You drop the color on and you swirl and you just kind of move it around and create the effect that you want. And if you don’t like it, you can just pull it off and clean it and restart.

So, here’s where the black comes in. And to do the—to get this little explosion effect, you drip from up high. And then here’s like a pull. So, you’re just kind of pulling this through and what happens is the paint follows behind. So you can create some really cool effects this way. You’re just like gently running this through. Just going to tidy up the edges. And then I’m going to give it a shot.

And so when you’re putting the paper in, you kind of put it in at an angle. You curve it so you get the whole—you get the whole paper in there at once. And you kind of let it sit for a second. I don’t remember what the instructions said. I kind of just counted to 30. And then what I’m doing—I’m grabbing this edge and I’m pulling it across this metal bar. And that metal bar kind of scrapes off the excess. And then I’m hanging it up to dry. It can drip a little bit. And it’s not going to be perfect, but that’s kind of the first—you know, that’s my first one. It looks a little bit more pink than purple, but I’m going to take it.

And I just kind of repeated that process over and over. And I’ll speed this up. But you can just see kind of the different effects. You can get a bunch of different textures. It’s really fun to play with. I tried to get some gold in there at some point. It didn’t quite work. But you’ll see—you’ll see how it goes. And I made probably 12 marbled pages. And I’m going to use some of them for the end sheets and the cover of the book. And I’ll have some extra—probably going to use them for bookmarks and stuff.

Anyway, that’s it for paper marbling. It’s a pretty fun hobby to pick up. Very easy to get into. And my wife is going to love the book. I’ll show it off when it’s done.

Oh, and I made a little bit of progress on the miniature. I’m working on the tabard. Just getting the base colors down. I’ll show more of that in the next vlog.