Ebru

5️⃣0️⃣ Things - The Art of Turkish Marbling 🖌

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I love Atlas Obscura and the online classes they offer. I often don’t realize there is something new I want to try (like Ebru) until I see a class offered on something unusual or something I’ve been interested in for a while, and I decide to add it to my list.

Ebru, or the art of Turkish marbling, consists of brushing color pigments on a pan of oily water and then transforming the pattern to paper. I watched Garip Ay deliver a one-hour class on Modern Ebru offered by Atlas Obscura and knew I wanted to try it. Garip kept mentioning ox gall during the class, and once I looked it up and realized it is “fluid taken from the gall bladder of bovine”, I knew I would need some help finding supplies.

Once I started searching, I found kits on Amazon and Etsy. I chose to buy some very basic supplies from an artist in Turkey.

Two of my 20-something-year-old children wanted to try this out with me, so we set up the kit outdoors and started experimenting. Instructions were not included with the kit, but I remembered a lot from my online class. The kit came with basic white printer paper, but we used heavier watercolor paper I had left over from a previous project.

After we had our dipping tray ready (filled with a gel-like substance that we created from powder included in the kit mixed with water), we were ready to drop in ink and swirl it around with a pointy stick. During my online class, my instructor used ox gall as mentioned above. The kit contained a jar of “Kivam Artirici/Thickener.” I honestly don’t know what it is, but I don’t think it’s ox gall but instead a cheap substitute. It still worked really well.

Next, we needed to lay a piece of paper on the ink and then slide it off of the tray. Somehow, only the ink floating on the top sticks to the paper and stays there when the paper is removed. We were really happy with our first result!

We kept going until we were out of paper, but we have enough supplies to experiment once again. I highly recommend experimenting with Ebru if you are looking for a new craft to try.

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