Marbling Magic

Following on from our first videos on suminagashi, the girls have been enjoying experimenting with ebru marbling. Ebru is probably the most well known and popular marbling technique, and the process of dropping and raking the vibrant inks on to a liquid surface is mesmerizing and instantly gratifying. 

The fascinating way in which the colours spread and flow, whilst remaining separate, even inspired a short Easter video which we made a couple of weeks ago.

Ebru marbling requires a little more prep work than suminagashi, so we bought this basic kit to start us off on the right foot before experimenting with other inks, “size” ingredients and patterning tools. 

Before you can get started, you have to premix the “size” – which is a thickened cellulose solution that your inks will float on – a day in advance. You also have to apply a mordant to your paper so that the marbling inks will bond to the surface. All this is very straightforward, but admittedly time consuming, and requires some advance planning. But once you’ve got your size and paper ready, the marbling itself is easy and fun! 

As usual the girls have made a comprehensive video on the whole process from start to finish:

For anyone who may want to try this out for themselves, here are a few things to note from our experience:

Marbling “size” 

The kit provided a small amount of carrageenan powder to prepare the size. However, carrageenan is relatively expensive, and we found sodium alginate (one of our popping boba ingredients) to be a good substitute. We also managed to use guar gum as a reasonable alternative (5g guar gum suspended in rubbing alcohol, then dissolved in 1L of hot water.)

Paper

We tried a variety of papers for printing and basically, with the mordant applied, they all worked. However, it’s difficult to handle thin soggy paper – the painful possibility of tearing a beautiful print is high. So we found heavier cartridge and watercolour papers easiest to use.

Inks

We’ve experimented with a few different marbling inks and india inks and again, they all worked. However, different brands of ink tend to differ in consistency, so they didn’t flow as well in combination with each other. Generally we had better results when we used inks from the same range together. Overall we found that india inks, which were a little on the ‘heavy’ side, gave the best result on print – the colours were sharper and more vibrant than the kit inks, which looks great whilst marbling but were more faded on paper after drying.

Printing

Printing ebru marbling is easier than suminagashi as the the ink doesn’t shift around as much. Some suggest rinsing the print in water to take off the excess size, but for some reason we didn’t have much success with this – the prints often ended up ruined. So from our experience, skipping the rinsing step is fine as well. Try not to get too much size on the back of the print as it can cause the paper to stick to whatever surface you’re drying it on.

So far we’ve only attempted marbling on paper; hopefully we’ll also get round to marbling on fabric and other items! Body marbling also looks amazing, but clearly has great potential for resulting in an almighty mess. 

Mess-free marbling

And for those who want a mess-free, hassle-free marbling experience, we recommend digital marbling on Procreate! If you’ve got an iPad, here’s a great video to get you started. You can get great results with this too.

Whilst ebru marbling certainly isn’t a quick and spontaneous art activity, it’s been a perfect one to do during this lockdown period as we have more than enough time on our hands. Even the process of preparing the size, applying mordant to the paper and playing with different inks, tools and dispersant offers up a lot of scope for experimentation and discovery. And as it’s almost impossible to make the results look bad, I think we’re onto a winner with this one!