Monday, August 27, 2012

Purple Haze: Japanese Suminagashi Marbling

We've old pros at shaving cream marbling, but mom has been weary of marbling with oil (even her tolerance for mess occasionally has some limit).  She came across this Japanese Suminagashi marbling kit and thought it looked like it would make some cool marbling effects without the mess of the oil.  So we brought it with us on our trip to Princess Anne.  After reading the directions, mom realized that this would probably be done best with one of us at a time -- the kit comes with a tiny circle of paper that floats on top of the water and you have to drop the ink very carefully on the paper circle so that it then spreads out across the surface of the water instead of sinking to the bottom.  Mom and I developed a plan -- I'd pick out the colors, she'd drop them on the circle, and then I'd make the design (we blew the oil gently across the water and also swirled it with a paint brush).  Once I was happy with the design, mom would help me place a piece of paper on top of the water, which picks up the ink and makes super trippy pictures.

It took a little more strong arming on mom's part than normal (I was in a MOOD all week), but once we set it all up, I made picture after picture.  And once I lost interest, mom kept it going.  We broke it out for a second time and marbled on top of some marker drawings I had already done -- the marker ran and spread out over the paper, too.  After a lot of random marbling, we started trying to plan out some marbling pictures because I wanted to use them as the background pages to write a story.  We haven't gotten that far yet, but that is our current plan for some of them.  Now what are we going to do with the 8,999 other marbled pictures?












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