When I marble I usually have a dozen or more colors going by the third day. I love color and I just keep adding another shade of blue or an accent of yellow. For my last marbling session, I decided to try something completely different. I had done some monochrome marbling before, but I had used four or five different variations – cobalt blue, Prussian blue, cyan, ultramarine blue etc. This time I used just one color plus black and white, or in a few cases, brown and white. I cheated a bit with the blue and used Cerulean blue, deep and Cerulean blue, chrome, but otherwise there was just one color.
It’s easy to get lots of shades in marbling because the paint spreads across the surface of the carrageenan and the more it spreads, the lighter it is. As more and more paint is dropped, it spreads less and less. The first paint dropped gets compressed and so gets darker.
Some pictures of my fun time:
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- Cadmium red, black & white
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- Cadmium red, black & white
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- Ultramarine Violet, black & white
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- Ultramarine Violet, black & white
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- Van Dyke brown, black & white (& a little green)
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- Van Dyke brown, black & white (& a little green)
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- Sap green?, black & white (& a little brown)
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- Sap green?, black & white (& a little brown)
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- Cerulean blue, black & white (&a little brown)
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- Cerulean blue, black & white (&a little brown)
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- Black & white with a touch of violet
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- Black & white with a touch of violet
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- Black & white with a touch of violet
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- Example of what happens when distracted while aluming!
Cleaning up is much easier when I only use three colors!