A Season of Marbling

The process of marbling with inks on water

I spent a couple months or more this year getting back into marbling paper. Years ago I had very easily (that’s how my memory played it back to me at least) marbled papers and they came out vivid and beautiful and I used many pieces from this time in many of my collages. Last year I went to try my hand at it again and something in what I thought was my routine process had broken - none of my efforts yielded anything usable. I was very determined to get it this time. I checked and tested everything: Distilled water vs tap water, alum light vs super saturated vs none, acrylic vs watercolor vs ink and many other things. I finally got my groove back on using onion skin papers and Japanese papers and mostly watercolor but also inks and I experimented with Suminigashi marbling and some other dying techniques. Here are some close ups of these experiments. My intention is at some point to have some papers available for sale in small packs, but we’ll see.