Nope, I'm not going to show you how to paint marbles. I am going to show you how to create beautiful, colorful paintings using marbles. I asked my girls if they'd like to try it and being the little crafters that they are, they of course, said "YES!"
You only need a few supplies, which are all pretty inexpensive...
and most you already have in your home.
Supplies:
1) Acrylic Paint in a variety of colors. (I have a large stash, but you can pick up the small bottles of craft paint cheap at your local craft store. Michael's, Hobby Lobby, JoAnn and even Wal-Mart carry craft paint. Prices range from .50-$1.00 per bottle). For this particular project I think the cheaper the paint* the better. It really needs to be pretty runny. The higher quality paints are usually thicker and don't work as well for this (as I found out the hard way).
*Apple Barrel and Craft Smart brands seem to be thinner.
2) White cardstock or mixed media/heavy weight paper
3) A large box that will fit atleast one piece of paper. (As you can see in the photo below, ours held 2 pieces).
4) Wax paper.
5) Masking tape.
5) Marbles.
We started by lining the box with wax paper. Make sure the box is free of any debris and smooth the wax paper down, so that it is flat with no wrinkles. We were fortunate, in that the wax paper fit perfectly, but you can also cut it to fit or allow it to go up the sides of the box a bit. If the wax paper isn't flat and smooth, your paper may lift up and the marbles will roll under the paper
(another thing we learned the hard way). I decided to put a small roll of masking tape on the back of each piece of paper to keep it from moving around during the marble rolling.
This proved to be a smart decision. 1 point for me! ;)
My daughters selected the colors they wanted for their art creations and I let them drizzle the paint on the paper themselves. This is where it helps if the paint is already a bit watery. You really don't want big blobs, as the marbles get kind of stuck and it's harder to spread the paint around
(if that makes sense).
After getting the colors on the paper, the fun part begins.
Tip the box back and forth, side to side, allowing the marbles to pick up paint as they go and creating this really cool streaky effect.
Each of my daughters (ages 11 and 6) took turns playing around with this technique. Between each round of marble painting, we removed the
marbles and wax paper and started over with fresh supplies.
Here is my marble art. My girls thought my choice of colors was "interesting". They didn't care for the sand color I used. But, they didn't know that I already had a plan formulating. They were content just to create the marble painting. I knew that I would want to use mine to create another piece. I'm currently working on a 30 day art challenge, where I'm making one piece each day for a month and posting my efforts on my personal facebook page. The reason I'm doing this is to challenge myself to find some new things to teach my art students when school starts up again in September. I'll be teaching high school students (as well as the 1st-8th graders I already work with) and think it'd be cool to start art journals with them.
I began by hand-drawing the coral on the back of the coral-colored piece of marbled paper (makes sense). By drawing on the back, there's no fear of my lines showing and if I don't like what I've done, I can just draw over my first attempt... or fine tune my cutting lines. Then I drew and cut out a seahorse and starfish from my darker, blue-toned piece. Again, I drew them by hand, but you could certainly print off an outline of a seahorse (for example) to trace around.
The floor of the ocean was from a section that had mostly the tan, sandy color. Once I had those elements cut out, I began tearing strips of colored cardstock to form my background. I think the tears and over-lapping give it a sense of depth and motion. I used gesso to adhere all of the pieces. Gesso is an amazing tool that I have recently fallen in love with. You could also use white tacky glue or double sided adhesive, though. Lastly, I used a toothpick and gesso to draw on the little bubbles. The toothpick worked well for dropping dots of gesso on the background. Then when it was slightly tacky, I went back in with the toothpick (in a circular motion) and removed the center of each dot.
My seahorse design was in part inspired by one of my all-time favorite illustrators, children's book author, Eric Carle. He has a certain way of hand-painting his paper, cutting out the pieces and placing them just so to create these endearing books.
My favorite one of his books, though, is Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
It was the first book that my son read out loud (or actually recited from memory).
It was especially meaningful to this momma, because he was 4 years old and the words from this book were some of his first words, as he was diagnosed with autism when he was two and
was non-verbal until his second year of pre-school.
To learn more about Eric Carle, check out this interesting video about the artist: Eric Carle
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