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Problem Encounters of the Marbling Kind

One of the most satisfying experiences I have when I’m marbling is hanging a finished sheet and realizing it is perfect.  It doesn’t happen as frequently as I’d like, but it does happen.  There are so many things that can go wrong and so many variants that sometimes it’s hard to figure out where the problem occurred. After all the papers are dry at the end of a marbling session, the first thing I do is to sort my papers into piles – saleable,  usable, disaster and that rarity, perfect.

For my own clarification and maybe to help new marblers, I am going to try to look at the places where marbling can go wrong and maybe how to fix it. This will probably take several blogs and may be interspersed with other commentary.

PAPER
First comes the paper. You can marble almost any kind of paper, but the results will vary. I’ve only had two total disasters. The first was a very slick brochure, both the alum and paint tended to slide off . Some color did stick, but it was very messy.  Slick magazine pages are very iffy, they might work, but they might not. The second wipeout was a heavy “cloth-like” paper napkin.  It lay down on the tray well, but just wasn’t strong enough to hold the paint.  When I lifted it from the marbling tray, it shredded.

Different weight papers may require slightly different techniques. I tend to catch bubbles on heavier papers because they don’t roll down as smoothly. If I switch paper weights, I find I have problems with the first ones until I get into the right rhythm. With anything that doesn’t bend, like mat board, I dunk the starting corner to keep the rest going smoothly. Antique paper, like pages from 19th century books, can be marbled if you handle it gently. It may need to be laid flat on a towel to dry, rather than being hung. Hanging weak paper, of any age, may tear the corners. Although I always rinse my marbling before hanging, I’ve found that a residue of carrageenan remains on the paper  which seems to strengthen old paper. Another quirk I’ve noticed is that slightly acidic paper seems to produce brighter and crisper marbling. Almost all the the new paper I buy is acid-free, but I have stashes of print and watercolor paper that belonged to my Mother and they all have some acid content, as do the maps and book pages I use.

For my standard marbling, I use Strathmore or Canson drawing paper. For use in my books, I try to stay within the 90gsm to 120gsm range.  For cards, I use standard card stock.  I have some lovely pieces on very heavy weight paper, but haven’t figured out a use for them yet, other than framing! When I need a large colored paper, I use Pastel paper, either Strathmore or Canson Mi-Teintes.

ALUM
I’ve read many times that you should not use grocery store alum for marbling, but only buy that expressly labeled for marbling.  Guess what? They are right.  I had to try some from a bulk food store that was just labeled “alum”, not “pickling alum”.  It did work, but I had a lot more papers that had alum streaks than usual.
Problems with alum are pretty easy to spot. If there are grainy, greyish spots or spots where there is washed out color, it’s probably due to an incomplete application of alum. The predominate problem I’ve had with alum, however, is user generated. I use the non-alumed side by mistake.

CARRAGEENAN
I’ve had few problems related to the carrageenan overall.  The proportions are important as is the blending time.  I use 2.5 Tbs. per gallon of water and blend for at least one minute. (I have very hard well water so I use bottled distilled water. Most people can use tap water.) It can last for up to a week, but I did have one batch that started breaking down after two days.  Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a paint problem, a carrageenan problem and general contamination.  In one particular case, I’m pretty sure it was just the carrageenan, because I mixed a new batch and the next day the same paint was fine. Contamination in the tray can usually be solved by a good skimming.  Just be careful to skim only on the top. If you dip too far into the carrageenan, you risk recirculating all sorts of bad stuff that has sunk to the bottom of the tray. Since all marbling takes place only on the top surface, what’s underneath can’t hurt, usually.  You can tell that the carrageenan is “worn out” if the problems affect all the colors. It also seems to manifest with globs with squarish sides rather than the rounder dots from paint problems.  The only solution for over-used carrageenan is to toss it and start again.
By the way, dirty carrageenan is Okay. In fact, it seems to work better after having a bit of paint in it.

UPDATE:  See my blog on “An Interesting Carrageenan Disaster” for a real problem I encountered.  In hindsight, I think I must have mismeasured the carrageenan and added an extra tablespoon.

PAINT

If you are planning to do a lot of marbling or marbling something special, it pays to start with quality paint.  I use Golden Fluid Acrylics because of their high pigment to carrier ratio. That means more intense colors even when the paint is thinned. They come in a wide range of colors and in several size bottles. Start with the 1 oz. size.  When you are using paint one drop at a time, you can do a lot of papers with 1 oz. Since you want the paint to float easily, avoid any “heavy body” paints. You should also avoid any paints meant for children. The cheaper paints have less pigment and can be unevenly blended causing problems for marblers.

Getting the paints balanced perfectly with your size can be very tricky.  One of the most obvious problems is having the paint contract into a tiny ball and drop to the bottom of your tray.  This happens when the paint is too thick or heavy in relation to the size.  The solution is usually to add more water to the paint, a few drops at a time.  Alternatively, a surfactant can be added to the paint.  I use Golden’s Acrylic Flow Release. Photo-Flo from Kodak can be used and marbling gall is used with watercolors.  Getting colors to spread instead of drop is usually just a matter of patience and trial and error.  I haven’t found a solution to the opposite problem, when a single drop of paint fills the entire tray! Reds and yellows are especially prone to spreading. To reduce the spread, you can try to add more paint, but I’ve found it’s easier just to start over with fresh paint and add water just a drop at a time until you have the right consistency.  I always mix very small amounts of paint to start so I don’t feel badly if I have to throw some out. Unlike painting, marbling is a matter of drops, not huge amounts.

Some paint will always drop out, at least it always does for me, but at the end of a session, the bottom of your tray should not be coated with a build-up of paint. Some scattered drops are normal.

A common problem I have is the paint granulating or stretching apart into tiny particles. This is especially noticeable when using metallics, but it happens with other colors. I haven’t found a real cure yet, but repeated stirring seems to help keep the pigments in suspension.  Just don’t stir so vigorously that you make bubbles. They are a real pain to eliminate.

If you click on the photos and examine the larger size, you can see where the paint has begun to break down. The finer I make the lines in the pattern, the more break down occurs. In some instances, like the silver and blue, the effect is gossamer, sparkly strands; in others, it is just a mess! The less you manipulate the colors, the less break down.

USER ERROR

Of course the most frequent source of problems is just me, especially in laying down the paper. All sorts of messes can occur, but air bubbles caught between the paper and the size are my most frustrating problem.  I have a gorgeous pattern in the tray and then a big bubble ruins it.

Hesitation lines are another problem I have on a regular basis. The lines occur when your paper isn’t placed on the paint in a smooth motion. Where you hesitate or jerk your hands, a line of paint forms.  This can be a desired result when you are making a ripple or moire pattern. I frequently have problems with the last corner and there’s a little line right there.  Hesitation lines are one of the reasons I don’t usually work with paper larger than 14″ x 17″. I’m short, my arms are short and stretching over a larger tray with longer paper results in lots of dips and lines.

More examples to come.

To be continued …

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Addendum to Overmarbling

I was doing some more overmarbling yesterday.  I have become addicted to it! I thought it would be interesting to have a complete record of the layers, so I took pictures of the original sheet, the overmarbled sheet and a smaller plain sheet that was marbled in the same tray as the overmarbling.

Here are the results.

Be sure to click on the photos so you can see the details of the overmarbling.

Fun, isn’t it? 

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Playing with Overmarbling

A few weeks ago, I had a marbling session that wasn’t going very well, not really badly, but I just wasn’t thrilled with anything. So, I decided just to have some fun by pulling out some old pieces and seeing if I could make anything out of them. Some were decent, but boring, others  had flaws and a few were disasters that I’m not sure why I even kept! One of my favorite things about marbling is that I never know exactly what a piece will look like when I lift it from the tray.  Will it have a bubble? Will it have a hesitation line? Will it be perfect? Will the colors match what I wanted?

When I overmarble, putting one layer of marbling on top of another, all bets are off.  I can never tell exactly how the two patterns or the two sets of colors will react with each other.  Rarely, I have something amazing, sometimes it’s dreadful, but it’s always interesting.

Here are some before and afters for some of the overmarbling I did.

I want to try this technique on a bunch of other pieces.  One technical note, I forgot that some of my early pieces had been done with watercolors rather than acrylics.  This means that some of the original paint  smudged or washed off when I tried to alum the piece.  I usually use a sponge to alum, but I might have been able to reduce the problem by using a spray bottle.  I now test a corner first to make sure the paint won’t bleed or smear.

In other news, I was finally able to start work on my garden.  I usually have it turned over by mid-April.  It’s May and I’m just starting.  It’s going to be small this year as I still have pickles from last year!  Lots of other outdoor work to be done and not much time.

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There Are Days Like This

Two weeks ago it warmed up enough for me to contemplate descending into my basement, standing on a cement floor and putting my hands into water.  In other words, to do some marbling. I made my carrageenan the night before, set up all the trays, paints and paraphernalia, alummed my paper and dove in. I was planning on doing some large monochromatic sheets, like I had done last year with smaller pieces. Yellow and red were the colors I chose and planned to mix orange. Orange is the only secondary color that I have had consistently good results mixing for marbling.  Those were the plans, anyway!

The first sheet I pulled had some line problems, the second caught a big air bubble, the third developed alum striping — and on and on it went.  I know it had been a long time since I had marbled, but this was ridiculous. Of the eight or ten sheets I pulled that first day, only one or two were good.  On top of that, I wasn’t really happy with the color combinations.  The second day was a bit better, but still way too many sheets that had major flaws so on the third day I threw in the towel on my plans, moved to a smaller tray with smaller paper and grabbed the metallic paints and colored paper.  A background color can disguise a lot of problems!  Things started going more smoothly and I began connecting to the marbling, but I was still frustrated.  What I need right now are large perfect sheets, not more small ones. At the end of the session, I started playing.  Maybe that’s where I should have started.  Here are some pictures of the good, the bad and the ugly!

It’s turned really cold (0* to 10* above) again, so I’ll have to wait for another attempt.  Here’s hoping I’ll be right in the grove and pulling perfect sheets every time!

In the meantime, I’ve been playing with some boxes.  They are based on the clamshell box used for rare books and for archival storage. This is the first one I’ve finished.  I’ve inlaid one of the pieces I enameled last year on the cover. The inside is a four-sided box (book boxes only have three sides) lined with black velvet.

I’m planning a lot more of these as I have quite a few enameled pieces and other treasures for the covers.  I just hope people like them!

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Marbling Geography

Last March, I blogged about my love of  marbling maps.  Recently I bought a large old atlas in poor shape which I am in the process of unbinding.  The pages are large, about 10″x 14″ for a single page and 20″ x 14″ for a complete double page.  The uncut page is really a bit too large for my marbling trays, so you can see some funky stuff going on at the edges where there is barely enough room to lay the paper down.  Edges can always be trimmed!

Marbling these pages was great fun as well as a challenge.  The colors printed on a map usually give very interesting and sometimes surprising results. This page is a good example of the huge difference color makes.  These maps are on one piece of paper and marbled as one piece.  The right side is a map of the world’s vegetation, colored in browns and greens with the oceans left white.  The map on the left is Great Britain and Ireland with the land areas colored by political subdivisions and with the oceans and seas in blue.

If I’d separated the pages, it would be hard to believe that they were part of the same piece of paper. Although the marbling pattern and colors are exactly the same, the whole feeling is different.  The map of Great Britain also shows how “mistakes” can add interest to maps. The light streak going up from the bottom left is a hesitation line.  By happy accident, the crosses the compass rose and could be a soft beam of light illuminating the map.

Here are some more maps with happy and not so happy accidents!

When I started marbling this paper, I had some trouble getting a smooth “lay down” due to the paper’s size and stiffness.  Consequently, I caught a bunch of bubbles before I mastered the feel of this paper. As you can see, some of these bubbles ruin the piece, some are hard to find and some can be trimmed off.  Most of the rest of the pages were fine technically with different degrees of artistic merit!

I spent the last ten days at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina and had a great time enameling and learning about historical book structures and trying my hand at some of them.  As soon as I straighten out my photos, I hope to post a blog about my experiences.

 

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Metallics Revisited

Last February I blogged about using metallic paints. Since then I’ve played with them a bit, but a few weeks ago I decided to do some more playing and experimenting. I’m finally getting around to writing my promised blog. This time I didn’t waste any effort on white paper and only used dark colored backgrounds.  Most of the paper had deep rich tones to set off the metallic. The only metallics I used this time were gold, copper and pearl.

Here are some of the results:

Here’s what I’ve learned.  The metallics need to be dropped near the end of the sequence to have the biggest impact. The more they are manipulated, the more they tend to fall apart, but dropping them last can lead to globs that are too large. Next-to-last seems to be a good place for them.  Some, like pearl, can be dropped earlier as it “stretches” without granulating.  Metallics show up more if dropped with colors that have a high contrast, for example dropping gold with purple, rather than yellow.

I love making marbling patterns that are very intricate and fine-lined.  This doesn’t work as well with metallics. They seem to need larger areas to turn from orange to copper or grey to silver.  I don’t particularly like a lot of shininess in my work, but I do like just a hint of something, like the hidden sparkle of a bit of mica hidden in a dull stone rather than the brilliance of a cut diamond. In the past I used Golden color called “Micaeous Iron Oxide” which does just that.

Here’s an example

Large Black

Large Black

All of the paints I’ve been using recently are Golden fluid acrylics.  I really like the intensity of color they provide.  Just this past week I visited the Golden factory which is located in a very rural part of upstate New York. The trip was organized by the Penn Yan Art Guild and there were six artists who participated.  The history of Golden is very interesting, having been a family company and is now owned by its employees.  We were given a tour by Emma Golden, granddaughter of the company’s founder.

Emma Golden

This is the area where all of Golden’s color cards are hand painted. Employees walk up and down the black easels painting one color on dozens of cards at a time.

Golden barn

This is an old barn that has been remodeled into housing and studio space for the Golden Foundation‘s Artist program. It’s a beautiful location.

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Aqua, Teal and Turquoise

In my last marbling session, I had a lot of fun working with the turquoise family of colors.  I had four shades to play with, making a lot of interesting combinations.  Here’s a quick look at some of them.

I even added them to some of the metallic pieces.

I promise I’ll do the metallic blog soon.  I learned a lot about different effects they can produce.

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What To Do When the Paper Doesn’t Fit

I recently marbled some maps that I really wanted to use as covers for my portfolios.  Unfortunately, they were just the wrong size.  Too short for the large size that fits an 8½” x 11″ writing pad and making them for a 4″ x 6″ pad would lose too much of the map.  I thought about either patching two together or framing them for the large portfolio, but just didn’t like that solution.  They would be perfect for a 7″ x 10″ pad.  Problem is, no one seems to make that size pad.  I could have them specially made but that would be expensive and replacements would be a nuisance for the customer. So I did the next best thing, used a 6″ x 9″ pad and made the holder a little bigger than it needed to be.

Now I have notepad covers that range from the small memo size to the full 8½” x 11″. Here are samples of the full range.

Four Sizes of Writing Pad Covers

Four Sizes of Writing Pad Covers

Here are the two new covers I just made.

The blue cover has old street maps of Washington, DC and the red cover are pages from a vintage children’s book about the seasons.  Both were hand-marbled by me.

More photos of the four sizes.

Last week I spent a lot of time marbling and I hope to get a blog up about my adventures with metallic marbling up soon.  I also canned the last of my pickles and the first of my tomatoes for this year!  The cherry tomato crop is still going strong with the return of hot weather and I hate to see them going to waste. I don’t hate it enough to try to skin them for canning though!

Cherry Tomatoes, red and gold

Cherry Tomatoes, red and gold

Tomatoes & Pickles

Tomatoes & Pickles

But most important of all, last week brought a new member of the family.

Back

She’s an eight-year old Beagle/Basset mix I adopted from a local shelter and she’s loving that I have lots of rabbits on my property.

 

 

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My First Enameled Book

Some weeks ago I took a class on enameling and was very excited to get working on some projects.  As usual, life intervened, but I have finished my first book.  Here it is!

Now I can’t decide whether to keep it or sell it.  One one hand, it may be the only enameled book cover I ever make as the rest of the pieces are smaller inserts.  On the other hand I really don’t need another blank book.  What to do?

I also decided just to hang my biggest enameled piece. I found out then how fragile the enamel is. Just trying to thread a cord through the holes in the piece, I cracked some of the enamel.  Not catastrophic, but you can see fracture lines in the enamel. You can just see them in the upper left corner when the photo in enlarged.  If I had a kiln, I could just re-fire it.

DSCN4479At the same time I was making the enameled book. I made another of the diskette books.  They are such fun! DSCN4518

I don’t really care for Coptic bindings.  They are not nearly as stable as a cased or bound book and they don’t protect the textblock as well, but they are a lot faster to make and are cute. I’ll probably keep them in my repertoire for fun, quick projects.

I’ve also been doing some marbling. Not terribly happy with the results as I been having a hard time with my carrageenan.  I don’t know if it’s the heat, the humidity or the carrageenan itself, but it’s been breaking down very quickly.  I was getting five or six days from a batch, but the last batches haven’t lasted more than two or three days.  Frustrating! I haven’t changed anything about the water, paints of the way I work, so I just don’t know.

I did have fun with these!

DSCN4512

 

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Catching Up

It’s been a while since I’ve posted so this blog is about catching up with friends, books, marbling and gardens.  After my return from the Folk School class, I had a huge crop of slightly over-ripe cucumbers.  I still have about two dozens pints of pickles from last year, but I just couldn’t let all of those beauties go to waste.  I made another dozen or so pints and vowed to have pickles on the table for every meal next year.  I decided that that was enough and I would NOT do anymore.  So far, I’ve held to it and have only picked cucumbers for eating.  Don’t know if I’ll hold out though!

We’ve had a stretch of cooler weather and while I love it, the tomatoes don’t.  The red cherry tomatoes just aren’t getting ripe. The orange ones (Sungold) are almost ripe, but not in the profusion they should be.  The full size are slowly ripening, but if we don’t have some hot sun, I might not have enough to can this year. Harvest from two days, minus the cucumbers!

Last week I had a delightful visit from a friend I’ve known for over 20 years.  We had rather lost contact for a while besides the annual birthday greetings and it was great to see him again.  It’s amazing how one can flow back into relationships with a friend one hasn’t seen in years and yet with other people it is hard to sync up even seeing them once a week.  People are strange and fascinating beings.  My friend had read about my marbling class and wanted to learn how to do it, so we spent a day playing with it!

Lots of fun, but I didn’t get much real work done.  After he left, I went back to the trays, but the carrageenan just wasn’t doing its job.  Not sure if it was the temperature, high humidity, my water or just random contamination.  Very frustrating!

Amid all this, my dehumidifier conked out.  My studio is in the basement so its very important that it stays dry, especially the area where I store my paper. I ordered a super heavy-duty model, but it took over a week for it to arrive.  More frustration.  To cap it all off, my hot water heater died. That replacement was fast and efficient, but not before I had to deal with a lot of water on the floor.  Not the time to be without my dehumidifier!

All is well at the moment and I hope to have pictures of some new creations soon.  I have listed my diskette books on Etsy, so I have a start!  More paper will be coming soon.

In another catch up, I talked a while ago about buying recycled odds and ends at a place in Durham, NC.  One of the pieces I bought was a broken slab of marble (not sure if it’s real or fake).  I’ve been using it as a base on which to pare leather and it is just the right size.  I’m thrilled with it! It’s hard to see in the picture, but the marble makes a smooth, hard surface to cut against while paring.  The edges of the leather need to be pared down to the thickness of a sheet of paper.  I’m not very skilled at it and it takes a lot of knife work to get them smooth even and the right thickness.

I hope to do some more marbling next week and hoping it’ll be more productive than last! In the meantime, lots of books to finish and hoping no more appliances die!

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