Marbling With Watercolours

Use watercolors to create a marbled background effect.

Marbling with watercolours.

Ancient method of decorating paper. Historically all water based marbling was accomplished with watercolor or gouache paints formulated from natural pigments and binders. Generally when the activity of painting comes to mind we think of paintbrushes. You can control the colors and how erratic you want the swirls and its amazing to then paint on top of or to use for mounting photos and such.

The colors of the historical natural palette are subtle but pleasing. Read more below to see how it went and our tips and tricks for keeping this colorful art activity fun with minimal mess yes this can get messy. Thick white cardstock or watercolour paper ellen hutson letterpress cardstock used here water based dye inks distress inks in shades of green and grey used here. Examples do exist of cloth marbled with watercolor paints notably the cover of charles woolnaugh s 1853 book the art of marbling.

Marbled watercolor and oil painting with kids materials. Oil and water don t mix together so it is intriguing to see what happens when we mix them with watercolors. I used fabriano watercolor paper 90lb weight heres a photo from the internet of what it looks like when you do it. There are other creative ways to make beautiful pictures which the younger crowd is particularly impressed with.

The process is fascinating and really easy. Easy diy paper marbling at home materials. You simply press a piece of paper into shaving cream swirled with liquid watercolours and the colours and patterns are transferred to the paper making it look marbleized. Today i ll show you how to make marbled paper with shaving cream and liquid watercolours.

Watercolor paper was the perfect thickness and absorbed the inks beautifully.