Theme Thursday - Marbeling with Shaving Foam

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Thanks to Quinn McDonald http://quinncreative.com/ for suggesting members of her creative incubater http://groups.yahoo.com/group/QuinnCreative_Rawart/join share some interest in the form of Theme Thursdays.

Fun, easy, messy and colorful - right up my alley. Maybe yours too. I first tried this technique about a year ago with a group of crafty friends who love to experiment like I do. We used everything from acrylic paint to watercolor inks and tried them on various types of paper & fabric.

I have collected some links (see below) that give similar directions for this technique, see below. I used some styrofom trays to hold my shaving foam but you could just put plastic down on a flat surface as your shaving foam will sit wherever you place it. You could also use an inexpensive flat foil pan or the bottom of a tin like cookies come in, just think slighty outside the box. I spread my shaving foam with a hard plastic spatula that I bought at the dollar store. An old credit card or one of those that sometimes arrive in your junk mail.

The other handy item I used was a wide-tooth comb. Once I placed my paints or inks on the shaving foam, I ran the teeth of the comb thru it, in wavy or straight lines or whatever. I also used a wooden skewer to make more swirls in the colors after the first print. I am usually able to get 3 or 4 prints off of one set of colors. The prints tend to get lighter as you continue to lift off prints.

The hard plastic straight edge is essential because you need to scrape foam off of your paper or fabric after you have lifted it from the shaving foam. If you click on any of the photos throughout this post, it should bring up a closer, clearer image.

The images just below are all done on silk from Dharma (see link above). The fun thing about the silk is that the moment it hits the color on the foam, you can see the design on the back of the silk.

Enjoy experimenting and please let me know how it goes if you try it. You can email me your photos and I can post them here or I will link to your blog when you post photos.

My sample photos: done w/ lumiere, Adirondack Color Wash and acrylic paints, but MX dyes and other things will work too. Try it, you might like it.

Here are the links:

http://fabricdyeing101.blogspot.com/2006/10/14-other-techniques-sky-painting.html - demo using dyes and incorporating shaving foam into/onto the piece

http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/marbling.htm - marbeling with shaving cream (onto paper) same can be done using fabric and acrylic or fabric paints (on top of shaving cream layer)

http://www.wikihow.com/Paint-Marbled-Paper-Using-Shaving-Cream - another using shaving cream & food coloring (on top of shaving cream)

http://my-croft.blogspot.com/2008/10/play-time-marbling.html - more step-by-step directions (tsukineko inks). Sample pics at end of this post.

http://www.bladerubberstamps.co.uk/site/how_to_foam.php - same technique using inks/paints with some suggestions for ways to use the finished products.

Also some pics http://www.bladerubberstamps.co.uk/site/shaving_foam_card_gallery.php - samples of cards using the shaving foam marbeling technique.

Last but not least, http://www.dharmatrading.com/html/eng/1498922-AA.shtml?lnav=gifts.html Dharma trading has many how-tos on their website and this one for shaving foam is done using Fiber Reactive dyes.

That's it for this Thursday. All of the paper ones pictured above were done as samples for a demo tonight at Quinn's Raw-Art-Journaling group in Glendale, AZ at http://www.thecreativequest.com/ . If you're local, we meet the last Thursday of the month from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Please leave a comment and let me know if you visit any of the links or try out the technique, or if you have questions I will try to answer them.

Thanks for visiting my blog.