There are so many different ways to give your papercrafts a marbled look, but I want to tell you about one I used for the first time today and had fantastic results with. Best of all, this technique is fairly inexpensive – all you need is small bottles of acrylic craft paint, a bottle of white shaving cream and paper. I chose to make marbled tags, but there is no reason why you could not make large sheets of paper using this method or marble scraps of paper you have on hand.
Here is how this technique works – and the results vary depending on the amount of paint you use and how much you mix the paint into the shaving cream. Just remember if you blend the colors too much you could end up with muddy marbling. This is not always a bad thing – it just depends on what you prefer.
First I squirted a single layer of shaving cream into the bottom of a throw away mini-bread pan – and later decided to use my plastic craft glitter catcher which gave me more room to work.
Then I added in the acrylic craft paint colors I wanted to use – one at a time making sure not to overlap the colors. I wanted to add some glitter paint as well. The first time around I added dots of glitter paint here and there, swilring it into the shaving cream at the same time I swirled in the individual colors. This was a mistake. The second time around I added the glitter paint first, mixing it in well. This spread the glitter more evenly and made it less likely to rub off when I removed the shaving cream from the paper.
Once I was happy with the way the colors looked in the shaving cream, I laid my tag on top and gently pressed it into the shaving cream. Once I was sure it was completely covered, I removed the paper – starting at one end and gently peeling it off the shaving cream.
I could have let the shaving cream dry in place, then buffed it off, but I was curious to see how this project turned out, so I used a craft knife to scrape the shaving cream off. I found if I simply scraped the knife off and went back again to scrap off the next row, the paint smeared giving me an all-over color with swirls in it. If I rinsed and wiped my knife between each row I ended up with a prettier swirl pattern and less background color.
That’s all there is to marbling paper with shaving cream. The main reason I prefer this technique over other marbling techniques is that using the acrylic craft paints allows me to work with a wider range of colors than what I can find locally in stamp pads. I also like the varied look of the finished paper.