Splitcoast Tutorial: Watercolor Marble

I had so much fun with this week's Watercolor Marble technique!

With some wet-into-wet painting and color layering, you can create beautiful marbled backgrounds. I used a variety of artist grade watercolors, ink, acrylic paint, and gesso on these samples, but you can use any water soluble medium you have.

This was the first background I did - the trick is to use a paper that will hold a lot of wetness - I used Fabriano stationery, which is one of my favorite papers to work with (I get the Portrait Folded Cards and cut them in half - I researched one time and that was the best value).

 This second card has some layers of ink and gesso for more contrast in the veining.

The third background is a little more simple, but I had some fun with the black, and more intricate veining.

Here you can see the effect of the black paint I was using - this is one of my favorite favorite paints to work with - it's Lunar Black by Daniel Smith. In the closeup below you can see how this paint separates into a gorgeous granulated wash - It's so much fun to use, and one of my favorites for shading when I paint.

 I wanted to share the brushes that I used for the finer veining - these are detail brushes for model painting, and they're so very fine and long - I think the longer one may have about 10 bristles. I just really liked the organic results I got from pulling these across the panel and through the paint, rather than using a fine round brush or regular liner to draw veins in.

These are from Silver, and they are from their collection of Ultra Mini brushes:

Silver Brush 2426S-20/0 Ultra Mini Short Handle Golden Taklon Brush, X-Long Liner, Size 20/0  

Silver Brush 2426S-7/0 Ultra Mini Short Handle Golden Taklon Brush, X-Long Liner, Size 7/0

Hope you'll give this a try, and share your results in the gallery!