I finally received my book – Paper Transformed by Julia Andrus in the mail.  The more I read about marbling, the more I was sure I wanted to use some of the other supplies I have around to marble additional papers. 

 I have mordant mixed up so that is not a problem.  Both boys had events last night so I was home alone for a good two hours.  I had several projects I am in the middle of but I set up a marbling station.  The station consisted of a 9×13 aluminum pan with about a quarter of an inch of water in it, a set of papers already treated with mordant and dry to be marbled, a place to dry the marbled papers, a plastic knife for scraping and several plastic forks for swirling the marbling.

 This particular attempt was made using about a quarter inch of water in the pan.  I, then, took the plastic knife and scraped pigment off three different blue pastels.  When I placed the treated piece of cold pressed watercolor paper in the water, it came out like the yellow and orange piece below.  I had a paintbrush near by so I wet it and ran it across the paper also.  This is how I got the piece above.

The particular piece above is just the pastel without any help from a paintbrush.  What I just noticed as I was scanning these papers is that the pastel pigment in this example was not really – even after treating the paper to accept the marbling – take.  I have orange and yellow pastel all over my scanner.  I just took a tissue and rubbed this particulare one and it looks more like the blue one now – just yellow and orange and red.

The marbling above was also done using water as the size.  I found, in my craft stash, old iridescent inks from Stampa Rosa – a company that has long since gone out of business.  I splashed inks on top of the water.  I, then, laid treated cardstock on the water and lifted it off.  It dried overnight.