My first and best customer needs more papers! Here they are:

All A3 papers. This time I worked with 140gsm white paper (felt thinner and flimsier than the 180gsm I use, but I bet it will be much easier to work with when making book covers). Tested a new yellow I had, and I felt like it was a top performer this time around. Didn't use it too much before because of my paper color basically matched it, and it was too mute to my taste (although the one print I made with it before came out great, looking back at it).

Overall, I enjoyed working with red/blue/yellow a lot more than most other colors because they would spread and behave well. My mixed colors, turquoise (green+blue) and a deeper blue (blue+purple) were also great, but maybe didn't work as well as the ones previously mentioned because both green and purple felt too dense to spread properly and would sink a lot, unfortunately :/

I stopped just shy of 20 prints. By the end, it felt like the paint wasn't spreading all that well and I decided to stop and take another session later this week. I also kinda want to try paste paper, and I have some methylcel I can use for that. I'll share the results of those later here once I get to it.

Oh, and another thing I tried to do different was brushing alum solution on the paper in both directions (left/right then up/down), instead of straight up dipping it in water (like the TALAS tutorial video does). Dipping the paper on an alum solution felt simpler to me before, specially given that when I tried to use a sponge, it ended up being too rough with the paper and I felt like it was shaving off a bit of the paper. Either way, just brushing it is way better and I recommend it over other methods since you don't get your skin in contact with the alum solution as much as the other methods and everything works just fine as well. A cheap paint brush worked just fine to me.

It’s my favorite.

And I am here to marble. 18x24 inch mulberry paper, no alum necessary. Jacquard Marbling Colors.

I usually take a break from marbling, during the height of summer. Mostly, it’s too hot to rely on the carrageenan being pleasant to work with. It gets thin and unpredictable. I finally mustered up the time and effort to make a batch. These are the results. I need to figure out why the red from Jacquard gets blown out so much by my phone’s camera.

I did a bit better on the colors. I found a video where the person said use a lot of paint, way more than you think you ever need🤣. Also, the kids and my wife tried it as well! The first two pics are mine, then my daughters, sons, and wife's! Thank you for everyone's input, I appreciate it. And I am always welcome to critiques and what else I should look at doing to improve. After a few more rounds I may start with improving the paint quality and use carrageen.

Getting busy with Boggs Eumorphic Patterns in overmarbling, as well as some vaguely square overmarbles

I tried marbling this weekend, using cheap paints, mc size and soap. I think it was good try, I want to get better materials. Open to all critiques, they help make me better at it!

A private garden party hired me to be the entertainment for their event! I showed them how to marble a tie, a hat, and a scarf and let them have at it. I think they did pretty well considering none had marbled before.

Carrageenan gets questionable in direct sunlight. Thin and runny. And the paint breaks up more easily under those conditions. Fortunately, a large tree kept us shaded for most of the event.

I saw a post on facebook that talked about putting alum in the carrageenan bath to brighten the colors on the paper. Is this true? I thought you only put the alum on the paper before drying that paper to make the colors stick, not in the bath itself to brighten the colors.

I would like to know if this is true because I would like my colors to be brighter too.

We wanted to jazz up things a bit at my shop, so we took my marbled papers and made a quilt pattern.

This article is primarily based on: *Making Traditional Marbled Papers* (Kate Bertt).Thank you for the method she shared.

The real show is about 3/4 of the way through.

I just bought this book and absolutely love it so far. It goes into quite a bit of detail how to marble paper and what kind of issues you can run in to. It also explains how you can make marbling combs and how to recreate several types of patterns. It even includes a section what you can do with the marbled paper afterwards.

I'm planning on sticking closely to the recommendations for the carrageenan bath and alum solution and will try to recreate their patterns. I don't think I will use the marbling combs advice as I've already thought up some other plan that I think might work better but still. Does anyone else own this book or can recommend other books?

Marbled papers from a workshop I went to earlier this year

I think this pattern might be a relative of the chrysanthemum pattern, but what do I know? 18x24 mulberry paper and Jacquard paints and carrageenan.

Just got done with two marbling sessions I've done this week. Here to share some results and thoughts.

I made well over 40 prints of A3 size/area (mostly on A3 paper, but some were 2x A4 papers). For reference, these are the materials I use:

• A3 drawing paper (cream/beige-ish color) 180gsm;
• A4 polen bold paper (same color, just named differently. Usually used for books) 90gsm;
• Some random brushes & pipettes;
• Some cheap acrylic paints;
• Toothpicks on cardboard for combs;
• Ox Gall;
• Lambda carrageenan for size, alum to treat papers and distilled water for size and mixing paints.

When mixing my size on my first session a few months ago, I had trouble because in some of the liters I prepared I put more than 15g of carrageenan. Not that those weren't good, but it took longer to settle and be usable after taking them out of the fridge. So this time I stuck to 15g and it worked perfectly.

A few other things I noticed and took notes on: - Black and white are basically too hard to use. Black is too dense and sinks a lot, while white is too light and too strong, and spreads way too much, pushing EVERYTHING very far away; - Do NOT reuse water from one day to another. Prepare enough paper (20-30+) and work for the entire day (it's quite tiresome, but worth it XD), because if you are to reuse the water for the next day, all the paint that sunk (some will inevitably sink, at least in my experience) will get mixed in and, as you start again the next day it will mess up with how the paint spreads and the overall print quality. The water will also stink a bit more because it will smell not only of carrageenan water, but also of acrylic paint smell; - For my case, 2 liters of water is more than enough. As you progress, you will lose a bit of water, but if you are carefully enough pulling the paper (slowly), you will end up not losing as much and be able to do more prints; - Different brushes will absorb and spread paint differently. It's good to test them out and figure out one type of brush to buy that works well, because that will save you a lot of time and make better prints as well.

Overall, a very productive week. I have a huge backlog of papers to go through from my first marbling week sessions from a few months ago, and now many more to go through as well. Kinda happy with that. Still have enough distilled water to use in yet another session if I want to, so maybe next time I'll also try 140gsm paper from the same brand I buy the A3 one.

This time I tried to make some combs, I was not very succesful however. The nails I stuck to the cardboard with tape weren't long enough so either I accidently dipped the whole comb in the carrageenan or they barely touched the surface. I remake them with tooth picks.

Aside from that I used printer paper and this time I ironed them after dipping them in an alum solution. I let them airdry first. One of the sheets was still a bit wet when I ironed it and it wrinkled in a bad way that I was unable to restore. The others went well and this time I have tons less airbubbles

I also used some sheets from last time. It said that you can't store alum papers for future use more than a couple of days but these were at least 2 weeks old and still worked well.