A Beginner’s Guide to Paper Marbling, With Rajiv Surendra | Paper Marbling Tutorial

[Music] hi i'm rajiv and i am a calligrapher but i also do a lot of other things at home on my off time i have recently been binding my own books one of the supplies that's often used in classic book binding is marbled paper so i have an example here i did not make this this was made in florence this whole book is covered with this beautiful marbled paper so i was really intrigued recently to try to figure out how to do it myself and that's what we're doing today we're going to marble some paper hopefully let me just show you what some of my early attempts look like so you can see the difference between an expert paper marbler and a novice so here's one of my early attempts nice right but there's like splotchy areas the color isn't as bright but nobody starts out as an expert in anything when i look back at my early attempts of calligraphy they make me cringe i don't even want to see them people will show me letters i sent them 10 years ago and i'm like oh god that's awful but you know uh you have to start somewhere and it has to be bad before it can be good there's a big difference between the word talent and skill and more often than not it's not talent it's many many many hours of practicing something you have to be willing to create ugly things in order to get to a place where you're actually proud of what you're making so that's what we're going to do today we are going to try to marble some paper if we encounter problems that's okay don't be scared we'll figure it out together paper marbling has a long history that goes back to japan to the i think the 8th century it reached europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and the images that we have of workshops in france are fascinating look at all these people doing the different steps the other thing that that's fascinating is the various tools that are used for the process combs and little spatter brushes the great thing about this process is that you can make most of these tools yourself you don't have to go out and spend a lot of money on the combs and the brushes combs like this which you pull through the vat of colors to create effects like this i made this just with a little piece of wood uh i drilled a bunch of holes into the wood and then stuck nails into the holes and put a strip of glue on the top to hold them in place cheap easy something that's going to really be useful later here's another comb that i made with the teeth spread apart wider and you'll see why that makes a difference later but you can also just keep your eyes peeled when you're out and about and you'll find stuff that maybe is used for something else that you can use for marbling like this i found at the hardware store it's a comb for cleaning out paint brushes this little thing was two dollars but i think it's gonna work great i haven't used it before so let's see a lot of modern paper marvelers will create their own spatter brushes and there's a technique of taking plastic straws or even plastic twist ties and just attaching them together with rubber bands and using those to spatter color over the vat i am a very strict marie condo fan so i know that if i'm gonna make something and hold on to it it has to be pretty and it has to spark joy when i'm holding it and just the idea of a bunch of black plastic straws held together with rubber bands going into my supply closet uh-uh i don't want that so so i'm going to show you today how to make one of these little spatter brushes that is actually the sort of thing that that someone could have made a hundred years ago before plastic straws this is known as a whisk for splattering color over the vat very simple to make you get um a broom a sorghum broom that's what this this is called sorghum it's a grain just get an old broom or like go to your grandpa's house and go to a shed and borrow his broom and then make a couple of these and put it back and he'll never know that you borrow the broom for this you start out by cutting at the top [Music] just a few of the stalks and pull them out of the broom okay don't cut it all from the same place because if you want to continue to use the broom you don't want to compromise uh the strength of the stitching over here so i'll cut a little bit from over here then maybe i'll flip it over and cut a couple from up here that's good for one whisk now you're going to just bundle them together like that and get some wire because this is probably going to get wet i like to use this coated wire that is not going to rust but you can also use copper or brass wire you're going to just take the wire and twist it around the stalks and then when you've twisted it just really pull tightly so that it stays together snip the wire off and do a couple more rounds of the wire just to really securely bind it in place so i do two that are kind of far apart and then one more it's sort of close to the base and now to finish it off and make it pretty cut these ends [Music] there we have a pretty little spatter brush that sparks joy grandpa can have his broom back now i have some watercolor tubes here that i'm going to use for marbling today but i also have some ground pigment from turkey that is actually the stuff that they use for paper marbling in turkey where they've been marbling paper for centuries so either way these paints need to be thinned down the thing about mixing these colors is they have to be very strong they can't be too watery if they're too watery the color is going to be very thin on the surface of the vat and it'll appear very faded on the paper so you want this to be quite strong i'm using distilled water you don't have to use distilled water but i just like to be safe so i'm going to start out with my palette knife and then i'm going to switch to a just a cheap hog hair bristle brush just to make sure that all those chunks are evenly mixed i think this is a good consistency we'll see this brush can now live in this color because we've mixed it up i'm going to clean off my palette knife don't be sloppy [Music] my nickname in high school my sculpture teacher mrs burke gave me a nickname princess make a mess because i always left a mess in the sculpture room so i have tried to get better at cleaning up my mess but we're gonna get messy today this is a this is a messy process splattering paint everywhere okay palette knife clean next color [Music] oxide red [Music] princess strikes again usually the color that you want in every mix is black because it's very dramatic put a little bit of the irish green in this pot here if you're adding water to paint it is much better to add it in tiny increments sometimes you'd be shocked at how much how far a little bit of water will go irish green like the hills of kilkenny i have all my colors mixed up it's time to prepare the bath very traditional paper marbling entails using some strange materials like oxgall oxal is a liquid that is actually extracted from the bile of bovine animals yes true you mix the ox call with the colors and then when you drop the color onto the bath it kind of goes like this oxal is really really important for this process you don't need very much though you only add a few drops to your colors so a small bottle like this will go a long way another very important ingredient in the marbling process is carrageenan moss or carrageenan moss or carrogine i don't know how it's pronounced anyways there's this stuff the powdered extract of carrageenan moss you just mix a couple tablespoons of this with some warm water i use an immersion blender and uh you let that cool i put it in a jug like this overnight to allow the bubbles to kind of disappear because it'll be full of bubbles when you blend it all together and you don't want bubbles in your bath the temperature of the bath and the consistency of the liquid that you make with this stuff is really really important it can't be too cold otherwise it'll it could gel up like jello and it'll be too thick it can't be too hot otherwise it will be runny and your colors will kind of run all over the place it can't be too thick otherwise your colors won't really spread and it can't be too thin otherwise the colors will go like this and you won't end up with marbled paper so just try make a batch put it in a small tray try your colors out if it doesn't work and you think that it's because it's too thin or too thick then you adjust it if it's too thin you mix up some more of this that's thicker and you add it to the bath and mix it in if it's too thick then you add warm water to the bath and swish it around with your hand and that will thin out the surface the third most important thing in this process is something called alum alum i think is used in like pickling i think you can get it in certain grocery stores in the spice aisle uh you add a little bit of this to some water you bring it to a boil you let it cool down and then you have a clear solution like this this solution is going to be rubbed onto the paper and it is used to mordant the paper alum alum in this situation is called a mordant morden in french means biting it's vital that you mordant the paper because if you don't put alum on the paper and you lay the paper down on the bath when you lift it up it will be very pretty but when you go to rinse off the slimy sludge from the vat the colors will run off too and trust me uh i've done that before and it's so disappointing it's so disappointing to see a beautiful pattern on a piece of paper and then alum solution for more tinting the paper vital and those are the three things that we needed to talk about so i have my tray and into this tray i am going to pour the prepared moss solution and this is called size once it's mixed up like this this thick liquid is the term for this would be marbling size s i z e it needs to be thick enough that the colors stay on the surface and don't spread out too much and that they don't sink but it can't be so thick that it prevents the spreading of the colors so as you do this you'll get a feel of how thick it should be by doing what i'm doing right now just running your hands through it okay let's set this off to the side and when this is not being used cover it you don't want dust to settle on the surface that will interfere with the marbling process the paper that you use for paper marbling ideally should be cotton paper or should have some cotton content to it we're going to be washing this paper and it's going to be wet for quite a while so it should be durable enough to withstand all of that water if it has cotton in it it's like cloth and it will do very well you also want the paper to be the right thickness it shouldn't be too thick you should be able to move it around and now i'm going to mordant the paper with the alum solution start with one piece of paper mark an x on the back of the sheet that's really important because we're going to have to remember which side came in contact with the alum when we're laying it down on the bath so i've marked an x on the back flip it over i have a little tray here with a natural sea sponge the books say that this process should ideally be done with a natural sponge i'm going to just give this a stir in case there's any little bits that have settled alum sometimes crystallizes when it's left alone okay [Music] so get this sponge saturated and then start on one corner and really look at it in the light and make sure that the whole piece of paper is wet it's very important that the alum comes in contact with all of the paper if there are any bits that don't have alum on it they will not hold the color great so let's set that over here and then the next sheet mark our x flip it over put the alam on and then this gets laid on that first sheet alum side to alum side we're going to create a little stack the paper doesn't have to be white you can choose different shades of paper experiment with it i have here some white paper i have some ecru buff colored paper and i also have some gray paper now that's my last treat on the stack these should be put under a weight of some sort so i'm gonna put them in between some craft paper and put two heavy books on top we're going to use the bread as the drying rack for the paper we're going to hang the paper up to complete its drying after it's been marbled i'm going to use this canopy the slats on the canopy will hold the paper this is going to get messy so wear some clothes that spark joy but that you're not afraid of throwing away afterwards so wear your ratty clothes and an apron because you wanna you wanna be able to splatter the colors freely and they might they might get all over the place i've put some drop cloths down if paint splashes on the wall of my bedroom then it just becomes part of the bedroom's history all those splotches oh that's when i was paper marbling that's what those are from now we're going to add ox gall to our colors just start with a couple drops in each color you can always add more the more ox call you add the more the colors will spread if you add too much they'll spread out too thin and the colors will be weak so that's why we start with just a couple drops this next step is something that we're going to be doing repeatedly through the process it's called skimming the bath it's where you remove the very top layer of the bath this is essential because you the surface tension of this bath is vital to this whole process and a skin a very slight skin forms on the bath within minutes so to do this we use newspaper and we just place the newspaper on the bath pull it across it cleans it bring it right up the edge and then have a box or a bag ready as your garbage that you're going to throw it into as soon as you do this it's ready for color and now we're going to test a little drop of black nice it's spreading but it's not going like crazy you want it to spread like a tiny drop of black initially should spread two to three inches this is pretty good now let's test out our other colors and see how they spread [Music] pretty yellow come on yellow nice turquoise good this light color i don't want to spread too much where in the purple hue the heel and hills weave you look no spreading okay this is good this is good now i can show you i am going to add one two three four five five drops of ox call see i love it okay great last color green [Music] sinking okay it's spreading but it's sinking which means it is too thick let's add a wee bit of water to our irish green now that all my colors are floating we are ready to start marbling we skim the surface with our newspaper to clean off the paint you want to lift it up at the end pull it off and now immediately lay down your color so i'm going to start with black and don't be afraid of spattering the paint next color yellow textures of the brushes will affect how the colors go on [Music] let's do some of this green right right here and a little bit of red that and turquoise once the surface has absorbed a maximum amount of paint the colors will stop spreading and we're almost we're almost at that point now get our paper [Music] x is the back so the other side is going to go down you hold both ends diagonally and lay the paper down in as smooth a motion as possible get a little skewer to eliminate air bubbles if air bubbles are underneath here they will interfere with the color pick up one corner slide it along the edge and lay it in our tray now very gently pour water on to wash off the size what do we think it's fun right okay now very carefully take this up and climb on the bed and don't slip hang this up to trick to drip dry out the bed so this is what the bath looks like when the print has been removed we're gonna go again so just before you're ready to go again remember don't do this in advance do it just before you're ready to throw the colors on i'm using this little piece of lead pipe to knock the whisk against which is traditional traditional i don't know a book says to do this [Music] okay now we're going to do something that we didn't do last time we're going to take a stylus and we're going to run it through the size wipe it off in between and now we're going to go this way [Music] okay let's add a little more black paper x on the back i'm running it along the edge skimming off that excess size along the edge okay so that was the version pulling the stylus through hang him up you can see here that the bath is getting murky but the color is sinking to the bottom rest assured that the color that's in here it's not going to affect your prints let's start with green and see what happens [Music] okay do we like that yeah i think we do so now we're going to go their stylus up and down then variation on from last time a comb just the surface don't go too far into the size breathe i'm holding my breath i want some splatters on top of here you just kind of see it as you're going you're like this needs this this needs this that's better okay paper paper x is the back [Music] i like that one look at how nice the comb was that two dollar comb from the paint store i just think of florence when i uh when i'm doing this so singing some italian arias can't hurt one more variation yeah let's do it we're going to try something i have never tried before it is called the peacock let's let's not put yellow on this time let's try a different color [Music] away like that yeah that's really nice oh like should we just put a little yellow on it looks sad without the yellow fine just a little bit so these pegs are staggered there's a row this way and then a row where they're in between and it ideally creates what looks like peacock no it's not bad but it's not it's not what it's supposed to be [Music] very nice this is the thrill of just diving in and going for it i love this one and because i was using gray paper the gray of the paper is showing through and looks like one of the colors and you can do that with any colored paper you can use blue or pink paper and um the blank areas will reveal that color don't touch that mahogany post with this wet paper let's make some more [Music] it takes a few hours for these papers to drip dry once they're actually dry you can take them down stack them together and put them under some weight there's kind of a crucial period of time in which the papers have to be weighted they have to be completely dry without being damp so feel them every now and then gently and when they're no longer damp to the touch pull them down stack them together and put them under some weights i just use a pile of heavy books and that does the trick in the morning they will be flat and smooth hopefully [Music] what do you think was this fun did you like to try it yourself if you like this video give it a thumbs up and if you didn't give it a thumbs down but either way please subscribe for more videos just like this one [Music] i want to know if you want to give me a thumbs down i can take it i can take it

Channel: HGTV Handmade

Views: 127,504

Rating: 4.9837532 out of 5

Keywords: Paper marbling, diy paper marbling, paper marbling for beginners, paper marbling tutorial, marbling art, paper marbling materials, marbling techniques, paper marbling techniques, example of paper marbling, marbling art technique, easy paper marbling, hgtv, handmade, diy

Id: 3x36f713jZA

Length: 28min 19sec (1699 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 07 2021