Last March, I blogged about my love of marbling maps. Recently I bought a large old atlas in poor shape which I am in the process of unbinding. The pages are large, about 10″x 14″ for a single page and 20″ x 14″ for a complete double page. The uncut page is really a bit too large for my marbling trays, so you can see some funky stuff going on at the edges where there is barely enough room to lay the paper down. Edges can always be trimmed!
Marbling these pages was great fun as well as a challenge. The colors printed on a map usually give very interesting and sometimes surprising results. This page is a good example of the huge difference color makes. These maps are on one piece of paper and marbled as one piece. The right side is a map of the world’s vegetation, colored in browns and greens with the oceans left white. The map on the left is Great Britain and Ireland with the land areas colored by political subdivisions and with the oceans and seas in blue.
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- Great Britain & Ireland: Vegetation
If I’d separated the pages, it would be hard to believe that they were part of the same piece of paper. Although the marbling pattern and colors are exactly the same, the whole feeling is different. The map of Great Britain also shows how “mistakes” can add interest to maps. The light streak going up from the bottom left is a hesitation line. By happy accident, the crosses the compass rose and could be a soft beam of light illuminating the map.
Here are some more maps with happy and not so happy accidents!
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- Two bubbles.
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- One bad bubble
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- One huge bubble and one smaller one
When I started marbling this paper, I had some trouble getting a smooth “lay down” due to the paper’s size and stiffness. Consequently, I caught a bunch of bubbles before I mastered the feel of this paper. As you can see, some of these bubbles ruin the piece, some are hard to find and some can be trimmed off. Most of the rest of the pages were fine technically with different degrees of artistic merit!
I spent the last ten days at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina and had a great time enameling and learning about historical book structures and trying my hand at some of them. As soon as I straighten out my photos, I hope to post a blog about my experiences.
