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Welcome back to Art Lab! Today I’m going to show you how to make some fun marbled art inspired by some this gorgeous art prompt!

Technique: Marbling

Art Prompt:

Ooooohhhh! Marbled/swirled paint.:

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Wow. Aren’t those marbled canvases just stunning? I’m going to show you how to create your own mini marbled masterpiece using just acrylic paint and a toothpick! (I’m afraid they won’t look quite the same as the canvases above, but… XD 😉 )

Step 1:

Spread a layer of paint on your paper (heavy paper such as cardstock works best). Make your layer nice and “juicy” but not too thick.

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Step 2: Pour or drip a little bit of different colored paint onto your base paint. Here I added a drop of purple and pink-purple (which was already kind of marbled together in my palette).

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Step 3: This is the fun part! Drag your toothpick through the paint to marble it. It works best if you drag through the paint without scraping the paper underneath. I chose to drag from the center point out which made a beautiful starburst pattern!

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Here are a few other marbling suggestions:

Start with four different colors:

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Go wild with your toothpick! Swirl it, drag it, move it up and down and side to side…

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Make a swirly pattern by drawing a spiral with your toothpick:

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Isn’t this neat? I put a drop of white down, then purple, then white again, and dragged the white outwards to make a star-ish shape. Then I dropped some white and purple spots around. Beautiful!

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You can even make marbled hearts:

Start with a few drops of paint close together on a contrasting color…

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Then drag your toothpick through the drops vertically: (Sorry, this example didn’t turn out too well, but trust me, it looks really neat when it works! 😛 The top two hearts are what they’re supposed to look like.)

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If you swirl the paint in your palette before dropping it onto your paper, you can get more blended designs:

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Or you can simply drop paint onto paint:

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The paint may take a while to dry since it’s pretty thick. When it’s completely dry you can hang up your canvas/sign your art, or make a “sampler” ATC of your experiments!

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