Paper Marbling Using Shaving Cream and Acrylic Paint (or watercolor!)

1. Introduction: Hey guys and welcome to another video. My name is Cory J, and I'll be your teacher today. Today's project is all about paper marbling. And I'm so excited because this project is so much fun to do. And you can create some really, really awesome designs. Here are a couple of different designs that I created. Let me get some really, really cool effects. And the interesting thing about today's class is that we're going to be using shaving cream. So it's a different technique. And it works so well. And I can't wait to show you how to do it. Stick with me here. So the first thing that we're gonna talk about is supplies. 2. Project Supplies : Okay, so to start off today we're going to talk about what supplies you need for this project. So the first thing that you need is a couple of different colors of paint. However many colors you want to use is up to you and you really don't need that much paint for this project. We're just going to be using little bits of different colors. So just pick a quarterly to what colors you like. The next thing that you're going to need is some little cups to mix the colors in because we are going to be mixing the colors with water. I used this plastic egg carton to mix. But what I didn't realize is that some of the little compartments here you can see here at the bottom are connected. When I went to go mix some of my colors because I added water to each of them and they've made them quite fluid, they ran into each other. So this wasn't the best for mixing. However, if you do have one where the little areas aren't connected, like there are some that aren't connected to each other. This is amazing, so it's really up to you, but you can also mix your colors in little condiment containers like this, or even just shallow cups. And even if you have a Styrofoam cup, you can cut off the top and just use the bottom. So there's a bunch of different things that you can use, but what you want is something that has a room for a little bit of paint and a little bit of water, and that's what we'll mix. The next thing I used was a little water dropper to drop the colors. But if you don't have one of these, no problem, you can easily just use a plastic spoon. This is what I like to call it a secret ingredient up today. It's a really awesome process and you use shaving foam. So any type of shaving foam will do if you're sensitive to send, I suggest getting one that's unscented. I actually am sensitive descent and this one is sent it and it was totally fine and actually smelled really nice. So just letting you know that's fine too. If it's scented. You're going to want something to mix in the shaving cream and the paint. I use these palette knives here, they're just plastic palette knives. You can also use a plastic knife or a popsicle stick, really anything, even a toothpick will work just to move around the pain and the shaving cream. Next you're going to need is some paper. What I did was I use nine by 12 inch watercolor paper. And I took four sheets and I cut them each in half. And so I came out with eight pages that were this size. And the reason why I did that is because you also need a dish. You want to grab a baking dish or a plastic dish. I use this glass Pyrex dish here. And you want to make sure that your paper size fits in the dish that you're going to use. Now, also, I didn't want to get my dish full of paint and shaving cream. What I did was I covered it with a plastic bag just to protect it. And that way you don't have to worry about washing paint off of it after I could just throw the plastic bag out after. You do want to grab a garbage bag as well. Now you're also going to need a container water. I suggest using a tablecloth as well to cover your entire table. And you will also need some rags. So this project is quite messy. So make sure you grab a couple of different rags to clean up any masses that might happen. Then one thing that we also need is some form of plastic card. I just used an old gift card. You can use an old credit card or gift card or even just a piece of plastic covered cardboard from packaging from something, anything like that will work. And that's gonna be to scrape away the thumb and reveal our design. Now that we have our supplies, Let's get into the project. 3. MarblingTechniques: Okay, So I'm gonna start with these colors here. So I just put a little bit of each color into the cartoon. As you can see, I'm not using that much paint here. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add water to each color to make it a little bit more watery. And then I'm going to mix it together. I'm going to use this dropper to add the water, but you definitely do not need this. You can just use a spoon or even pour the water into each little compartment here. I just thought it would be easier to use the dropper, but it turned out that it didn't really matter. It could definitely just use a spoon. I'm going to cover each of the blobs of paint with water. I think if you bring the water level up to just above the paint, it'll be a good mix of water to paint. Then you're just going to mix it together. I'm just going to use this palette knife to mix it, but you can use a plastic knife or plastic spoon, whatever you have, even a popsicle stick and just mix each of the colors together. Then this is where I went wrong because the colors didn't realize they were attached, so they started bleeding into each other. But I'm still going to use it anyway because it won't really matter in this project, everything's going to get mixed together anyway. Then you're going to grab your dish. So I'm using this to Pyrex dish and I'm gonna cover it with a plastic bag, garbage bag data. That way, it won't get all messy. Then I'm gonna grab my phone and I am going to spray this foam shaving cream all over the inside here. I'm just going to use a nice layer. You don't have to use a crazy amount like you don't have to layer it up, you just want to do a single layer of it. And then I'm going to grab a plastic card. So this is just an old gift card that I'm using. I'm just going to smooth it out. You just want to take the card and run it from side-to-side and just smooth out the shaving cream so it's in a nice even layer. It doesn't have to be too thick or too thin, just like one layer of the shaving cream smooth out. These cards are really handy because they're easy to clean, easy to wipe off, and they work really well to smooth everything out. I'm just going to go ahead and make sure that the layer is nice and smooth. And you want to make sure that this layer is bigger than the size of your paper. So keep that in mind. You want the dish that you're using to be bigger than the size of your paper as well as a layer of shaving cream. Next, I'm going to use this dropper again and I'm going to drop little drops of color all over the shaving cream. Now, again, if you don't have a drop or just use a spoon, anything, even you can even pour the paint on into little drips all over the place. This part is really easygoing and carefree. There aren't many rules to it. You just want to go ahead and drop a bunch of colors all over. So I'm going to start with, I think about four colors and just drop them in randomly all throughout. I do find that it's nice to have a darker color mixed in with some lighter colors. It gives a really cool effect, but you should try a whole bunch of different color choices as you go through this project, we're gonna make a bunch of these. So this will be the first go and you can always add in colors and take away colors as we move through the project. So now that I have all my colors and then I'm gonna take my palette knife here. And I'm going to go through and swirl the paint. Now you can even do this with the back of a paintbrush, the backside of that paint brush, or even a popsicle stick, anything really plastic cutlery. You just want to go through with something. Even a toothpick would work really well here too, and just swirl all the paint together. Now however many swirls you make us up to you. But the more swirls you make, the more intricate and interesting the design will look. So it just depends what you're going for. If you want a more dramatic design, then you want lots of swirls. And if you want a more muted design, then you can try different techniques of moving the paint around in the shaving cream. I'm going for a more dramatic design here. Lots of swirls. And then I'm gonna take my watercolor paper and drop it in here. Now you want to make sure that when you press it in, you press it in everywhere that the watercolor paper is touching the shaving cream because you don't want any extra spots or extra paper where it didn't quite touch. You want to go through and really move your hand on the back of the paper all over and just make sure that every single side or every single area of the paper has touched the shaving cream. And then you just want to peel it up from the corner nice and gently. Peel it away and then you'll get something that looks like this. Your paper will be loaded with shaving cream and the paint. You want to put that down on a surface. And then you want to take any type of container. So I'm just using my paint container because I'm not going to use it anymore for the discarded foam. And then I'm going to take the card and just lightly scrape across and reveal the image. It's so beautiful to see what comes out underneath here. This is my absolute favorite part. You just want to hold the paper on the corner there and just lightly pull across and lift up the shaving cream and then discard it into your container. You want to keep doing that until the entire surface of the paper has no more shaving cream on it. Just make sure that you get off any lumps or blobs and the paper after is nice and smooth and just discard everything into that extra container that we pulled up there. Make sure there's no residual. And then you can put your card down. And this is what I got. So such a beautiful marbled paper image. So nice. Then you want to just lay that down to dry. And then we're gonna go back into our baking dish here. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take that container where I discarded all the phone when I'm actually just going to put that phone right back into the baking dish. So all the foam that I've scraped off of the card there with the paint on it. I'm going to move it back into the baking dish and then I'm going to smooth it on out. I'm gonna take that plastic card and smooth it out to get it nice and smooth and you'll see the colors will melt together, okay? And that's totally fine. You'll get whatever color that you're, the colors that you use mixed together will make that I'm gonna use this as my background for my next piece. I'm going to go back and again and drop some more colors here. I've tried to use a little bit of a different color palette for this one. Then again, I'll go back in with my palette knife and swirl everything together again. Then we're going to pull another painting. Once everything is swirled altogether and you feel happy with it, then you're gonna go ahead and grab your paper, pop it in there, and then make sure that it's pressed down all the way so that everything has touched. There's no areas of the paper that happened. Touch the foam and then you want to pull it up from the corner again. I always like to pull it up slowly. But this part is really interesting, even just the visual effect of pulling it up. It's so nice to see. Then you'll get something like this. Then again, we're going to lay that down on a table surface. And we're going to use our same technique of scraping off the foam with plastic card and then dumping the access into a little discard container. As you can see, this one's quite different, so it has that kind of background color that we started with. But then all the beautiful paint colors on top. Now try not to press too hard when you are scraping off the foam. Is watercolor paper, and watercolor paper is sturdy but also delicate at the same time. So you want to keep the integrity of the paper intact, then just scrape it off there. And this is what you get. Another really beautiful piece that's totally unique and different and mobilized. Okay, Next I did the same thing, so I put the extra back into the container. Now I'm gonna try some new colors. So I mixed a green and a blue. And I'm going to try a couple of different colors here that I used in my next one. I'm going to use this yellow color. That's really nice. And then again, same process. Swirl it on through. Once you're ready, you want to pop your paper and then pull it up gently to reveal the print. Now you'll see here there are little bits of areas that didn't connect. The paper is still dry there. So I'm gonna leave those and just show you what happens when that happens. I'm going to place down the paper here, grab my container, and then do the same thing. So start on the very corner here and scrape the paint and the foam off. You'll see that that white area really isn't so bad. When I scrape everything off, you can still see it a little bit. It kind of adds to the design and I really don't mind that once the shaving cream and the paint has split across it, you really don't notice it that much, so it's not an issue if that happens. Another interesting different piece that we pulled here. Now for the next one, I'm going to take that container that we just used just as it here. I'm going to go and just use it right away. For this one, I didn't add any extra shaving cream. I didn't add any paint. I'm just going to go into the exact same container a second time and pull at another print. This one looks like this here. It still had quite a bit of paint on it. So I just thought I would just go right back in and pull it right away. You can see without swirling it as much with the design a little bit muffled. It creates a totally different paper. So you can always go back in a second time into your container if you feel like there's still enough paint and shaving cream in there and just pull another print right away. So now we're here. So I just pulled two prints and now my containers looking kind of empty, I'm gonna go back in and just add some more shaving cream. If you feel like there's not enough shaving cream and your container, that's when you can go ahead and add more or if you feel like the shaving cream in your container is too tainted by the paints that you're using and the colors gone a little bit MCI. You can always go in and add some more shaving cream. That's what I did right here. Next, I mix these new colors here. I'm gonna go through and play around with them. So here I'm just going to drop them straight from the container. So you can drop them straight from the container. You don't need that eyedropper that I've been using. You can just really pour the paint right on to the shaving cream like I'm doing here, and just use whatever you have available. And then I'm going to add some darker color here, some of this darker purple, because I really like how a lighter color and a darker color mixes in together. And a little bit of pink. Just really make a nice multicolored piece here. We're going to add in quite a bit of colors to this one. Then I'm going to follow our same process of going through and swirling it all around with my palette knife here. This one, I'm going to swirl around quite a bit. You'll see that this one has lots of swirls going on here. And then I'm going to grab my paper and pull it up. You can see here as I pull it up slightly, there's lots that didn't connect, so I didn't push it down enough. I'm just going to repress the paper into the shaving cream and the paint mixture and push it a little harder and then pull it up again. And there we have much better coverage. And this looks so nice and like earthy and sea foamy. I really, really love this color palette. And then I'm going to go and reveal this, a really beautiful design. This was one of my favorites. I just loved the color palette. I love how it came out, and I love the effect when you swirl it lots so this one, I had lots of swirls and yeah, just looks so beautiful. So many nice colors mixing together, kind of like a greeny blue palette. Then for this one again, I'm just going to go directly back into the paint tray. There were still lots of swirls and lots of paint and lots of foam in there. I decided instead of swirling anymore or adding any more foam, I would just go right back into it and pull a second marbled piece here. As I pull it up. Look so cool. Even just freshly pulled with kind of looks like waves. And then I go through and do my same process of revealing the design. This project can get a little messy. So you should make sure that you have a rag with you, wet rag and a dry one just to wipe your hands in between polls. I don't mind that my hands get a little messy, so I just went with it. 4. Outro: But yeah, that's the idea of the project. I hope that you learned a lot and that you really liked this technique. And I really can't wait to see what type of different papers you guys pull. I'm sure they're gonna be so beautiful and so unique, and I can't wait to see them. That's it. Thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video. Okay guys, that's it for today's project. I hope you enjoyed and you thought it was really fun. One thing I wanted to tell you is that these do dry very quickly, so they would dry fully within an hour. But one thing that I want to note is that if your paper starts to curl like this, just wait until everything is completely dry and then you can stack the paper under a stack of books. Just lay the paper is flat and then put a bunch of heavy objects on top. So I use a stack of books, just pile up a couple of heavy books on top of it and then leave them overnight. And then when you come the next day, they should be nice and flattened out. Thanks so much for being here today and I can't wait to see what you guys come up with. Feel free to post some pictures of what you created in the class discussion and we'll see you in the next class.