Marbling inks

"Suminagashi or "floating ink" is the process of marbling plain paper with water and ink to transform it into something vibrant and colorful. It originated in Japan as early as the 12th century."

This is traditional marbling that I found on youtube, I have some marbling inks so I tried this technique out and it produced some great pieces of work! I originally was going for how 'scum' is like a skin on top of water, like a swirly, oily, foamy froth, and having used marbling inks as a child, I remembered that they might be able to portray the kind of effect that I wanted.

I ended up having a play with them and created something that looked like elephant skin! I also used white cotton mostly instead of paper to see what kind of effect that created, which looks fab because the cotton soaks up the ink. The only problem I found was that when you pull the paper / fabric out of the water the inks run a little, but you just have to be careeful when removing it. Sometimes its good to drip the inks in and then leave them, rather than swirling them round with a stick, this is what created the elephant skin effect. I videoed myself using the technique so I shall put that up on here too along with pictures of what I created.