An old technique revisited.

At art camp years ago, I taught shaving cream marbeling.     Later my friend Roberta taught us to marble with starch as a base and diluted paints.     I got interested again, as I was going through my stash of supplies and realized I could use some up with a little workshop in Lodi for the mixed media gals.     good ness knows I have inks.    But I did not have starch.   Thought I'd pop in the dollar store and pick some up - but starch is not a popular item now, and I had to go to pricey grocery store to get it for nearly $5.00 a jug.  It's a smaller jug thatn it used to come in - and it has gone the way the price of eggs has - up and up and up.       

Anyhow, armed with these supplies, lots of paper samples, trays, stirrers, etc. the mixed media gals had a fun day playing with it all.    At first we had very little success, in fact it was pretty dismal - but apparently the starch needs to sit for awhile.  I think it has to do with surface tension.     At first the paints just dropped to the bottom.  We needed it to float on the top and spread.     When we finally were cleaning up, we just started tossing paints into one batch of starch and all of a sudden it was floating and spreading just as we hoped.    Some of the gals tried different papers, including paper towels and napkins.     Wow, these were cool.    We got realty indiscriminate with colors and materials at this point in a rush to finish up.   These ended up being the best work of the day.   LOL  You just never know...... 
This first photo shows two pieces from the starch tray.   

 The next day was a scorcher, weather wise, so wanted to stay inside and play with art materials.    These next ones were done with shaving cream and old inks from stampin up reinkers.

 These were done in series, as I pulled maybe half a dozen from each tray.  The darker ones are from the first pull, then successively lighter until the colors all run together.    

Some of the gals are trying other methods and we will have another play day with these materials next week to see if we have learned anything.     The shaving cream is not as heavily scented as it was years ago. Some of those papers still retain a little of the scent.