Creating a Marbling Effect on Pottery

Video Transcript

"In this segment we're going to show you how to marble on your piece. So this is a different way of marbling and it's kind of fun but make sure when you're doing this technique you've got lots of space and you don't have any neighbors that are painting next to you, because it can get a little messy. So what we do for marbling is we're actually going to be making a mixture in a little pot of paint, water, and soap. So generally you want mostly paint, a tiny squirt of soap, and a little bit of water. And what this is going to do is it's going to dilute the paint and obviously make it soapy, so we have some bubbles. You only want a tiny dollop of soap because you don't want too too much because you don't want the paint to resist when it's being fired which can happen if too much soap has been added. And one way to tell if you've used too much soap is if you start to get a really thick foam. You might want to just go back and dilute with some more paint or some more water, generally go with more paint. So all I've done is I've sort of pre-stirred, so your mixture should look like this, you should definitely see the colors and any bubbles that you make, and this is also a really good tip, we're actually going to use this straw to blow into our mixture to create bubbles, and then we're going to press our piece into it. So make sure when you're seeing the bubbles start to rise up from the container that you're seeing the color inside your bubbles. So we have our wonderful little mixture here, so all I'm going to do now is start to blow bubbles into the piece and have your piece ready on hand so you can sort of quickly sort of go and get all those really good bubbles on the top. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to take and, make sure you don't suck, only blow air out, and just as it's about to fall over the edges, we're going to stop and we're going to take our piece and we're going to press it into the bubbles. And then when you pick up your tile you can see all the nice colors that have been made, all the nice little bubbles and you can go back and sort of pop the little guys with your fingers. And then we're going to go back, blow some more bubbles, and then create more. And you can sort of adjust the bubbles, or the marbling, however you want. If you want really, really concentrated or just slight sort of effect. So I'm going to go and try to get those spots that I missed and have a nicely concentrated marble tile. So again I'm just going to go pop those bubbles with my finger. Make sure when you pop the bubbles that you're just touching the surface of the bubble - you're not going to press all the way down because you'll loose that nice ring you got when the bubble becomes popped. Another thing you can do with marbling is you can actually mix your colors. So you can take three or four colors and marble with them differently. Now if you were going to do multiple colors, you would want to make sure you get a brand new mixture for each color. The other thing you can do is actually paint a background color onto your piece, and then marble on top so you're sort of creating a little bit more of a subtle effect, but really, really still nice. So that's our instruction to marbling!"