Bindery & marbling room · decorated papers made to order

The Marbling Atelier

Float colours on a bath of size, draw them through with stylus and comb, then lay down a sheet, as the Suminagashi, Ebru and European marblers did.

  1. Echizen
  2. suminagashi, 1112
  3. Herat
  4. kāghaz-e abrī, c. 1490
  5. Istanbul
  6. ebru, 1539
  7. Amsterdam
  8. first European account, 1616
  9. London
  10. Woolnough’s Art of Marbling, 1853

Plate IBouquet

0 passes

Keyboard
D W S C R B T
Drop brush, whisk, stylus, combs, curl, fan, turpentine
1–9, 0
Colour pots in order; 0 is clear water
← ↑ → ↓
Turn the comb
Ctrl Z / Shift
Undo, or redo with Shift
[ ]
Step back and forward through history
P
Switch between the bath and the proof
F
Studio mode; Esc leaves it
L
Lay down a sheet

The drying line

Pulled sheets hang here to dry. Lay down a sheet to take your first print.

On the craft

Marbling floats colour on a thickened bath called the size. Each colour is mixed with ox gall, a surfactant, so a drop spreads into a disc and pushes every earlier colour aside into veins. Styluses, combs and rakes then draw the floating colour into patterns, and a sheet laid on the surface takes up the whole design in one print. European papers were mordanted with alum first; ebru and suminagashi papers are not.

On the mathematics

The bath here follows the model of Lu, Jaffer and colleagues (Mathematical Marbling, IEEE CG&A, 2012). A drop of radius r at C moves each point P to C + (P−C)√(1 + r²/|P−C|²). A tine moves points along its line by z·ud. Every stroke can be undone exactly, so each pixel is traced back through the whole history of the bath.

Sources consulted