When I first started marbling my answer was to find a color that seemed to consistently give me small drops on any given day and save it till last. That worked most of the time but gave me very little control over what would be the last color on my papers. Over time, I have learned how to better manage the laying down of the color.

The marblers major tool in managing aggression is the rule that, once you have the paint mixed (I suggest you use a quarter sized amount of paint with about 1.5 oz water), if you want your drops to spread more (i.e., be more aggressive) you add paint and if you want your drops to spread less you add water. Note that this is just the opposite of what your “common sense” would suggest; that’s and easy way to remember what to do.

But the marblers life is not that easy! There are other factors that must be considered:
The amount of aggression in the drops of any color are also effected by when you put them on the vat. In the first rounds of dropping colors, the drops spread out more, then as increasing amounts of paint are on the surface of the vat, the drops have less space to spread so they get a little smaller.
Another factor affecting spread/aggression is the nature of the pigment itself and how it compares to the pigments that it is touching on the surface of the vat. Sometimes if your last round of color is very aggressive, you can break up the color by dropping another color in the drops of those big drops.

So how do I juggle all this when I’m marbling? I try to see how each color is reacting on the size for that day by doing a couple of sheets. As I work, I weigh how the color behaves as one of the first rounds and also as one of the last rounds. Only then do I start adding water or paint. And I only add a little of either at any one time and test how the paint works before adding more.

While this sounds really complicated, pretty soon it becomes almost second nature. Also, if I want to use a color that is aggressive towards the end and get big drops, I then add other colors that I have already dropped inside the bigger drops to break up the color. In the picture with this post, the black paint was very aggressive because I added pigment and did not respond well to having more water added so I added drops of white, blue, and green inside those big black drops to break up the color (or lack thereof!).

Here are some basic guidelines:

• Keep the dropper just a couple of inches from the surface. That gives you more control of where the drops go.
• Focus on learning to squeeze the dropper head at a consistent pace and move the dropper over the vat at a consistent speed. This will allow you to get to that one drop at a time ideal and to have uniform color across the vat. This is not a natural ability for most of us (kind of like rubbing your stomach and patting your head) so don’t be surprised that you need to practice! Once you master this basic approach to applying paint, the paint application will go much faster. Also, you can vary how you place the color to achieve different effects that you want to experiment with or find more appealing.
• Remember that when you first apply color and there is no competition for surface space on the vat, the paint spreads quite a bit. But as you put more and more paint on the surface, it pushes the earlier drops around and they get condensed and easier to see.
• There is no need to take the “fried egg” approach to dropping the paints if you are going to pull a pattern with combs afterwards. I think people may take to doing that because they think it will help the combed pattern have more rings of color. You don’t need to do that! It is the job of the combs to create the rings. Every time a comb crosses the vat a set of rings is created. Some patterns made of just “fried egg” rings are quite lovely, FYI.
• When doing combed patterns I have found that dropping first light, then dark, then light, then dark colors will make the patterns have more definition.
• You put on color until the drops do not expand more than to the size of a 25 or 50 cent piece. If the color drops are much bigger your combed pattern will have places where the pattern is all one color and is really hard to see.

These guidelines are for your early marbling career. As you become more experienced you may find that you may prefer a different way of “throwing” paint on the paper but still you will find that these basics were worth developing because of the added control they give you.