Marble Effect Base

[Corporea]

Not sure this is in the right spot on the forum, but it'll work.

 

I plan to go through step-by-step a marble effect, so this may be picture-heavy. I'll also include some alternative patterns after the step-by-step, so if anyone has a color request or marble style request let me know! I'm not attached to any particular marble. Except maybe the pretty ones.

 

I found these marble tutorial resources helpful:

Chest of Colors

Massive Voodoo

Oz Painters

 

First I made a marble base out of sculpey:

Once it was baked, I primed it using a combination of gray and white. Gray for the recesses/grout areas, and white for the marble surface.

I used a fairly dry brush with the white primer to just cover the surface of the tiny edging tiles. Hmmn... now it looks like a little window icon. Sigh. Ignore the cartoony base. It will be painted!

 

Right now I'm tentatively leaning towards this marble pattern, but this is as far as I got, so request alternatives if you want! I got it by searching google images for white marble.

Link: http://www.cepolina.com/stone-marble-white.html

I like it because it will let us play with creams, reds and some freehand lines. More later!

[klarg1]

Looks like a good pattern to work with to me. Thanks for doing this!

[Loim]

@Corporea thanks for this. I'm actually working on building a marble base for a Elven Knight I'm painting. Perfect timing.

[BloodRose9337]

How did you make the grout lines between the tiles? From a design standpoint, the lines between the large tiles are fine but the lines in the decorative border seem a bit big.

[Corporea]

I agree- initially used xacto knife, but then extended them using a flat sculpting chisel. I think I can fix it with paint...

 

Now that we've got our base primed, we need to make it pretty! Let's begin.

First: colors! I used all reaper colors: linen white, pure white, carnage red (my favorite red!), saffron sunset and IMEF olive. I promise. That's it!

 

Step 1: Paint on a layer of linen white. I'll start with one square on the top right to demonstrate. I put on the linen white and quickly blended in some olive at the top left and saffron sunset int he bottom right. I did this with one brush, lots of water and fairly quickly before my paint dried to blend the colors smoothly.

 

Step2: Start to define some of the creamy orangey colors in the marble as a basis for later adding on the red lines. I did this with a thinned saffron sunset blended with plain water out from the lines of paint I put down. I did this in a few layers as you can see below, and with each one got a bit brighter orangey color.

 

Step 3: Start to prepare for the red lines! I then added a bit of the carnage red, just in a thin glaze in an area I knew I'd want a red line. Sometimes when I paint a flat surface, I treat it like watercolor paper. I put down a thin wash of plain water and then go back and add a touch of my paint color and gently blend it outwards in both directions, using the water present to create a nice thin glaze that has a darker center (if that makes any sense) An alternative to this would just be doing a thin glaze, but moving your brush from the edge of the color area to the center, making your center darker (where then paint is pulled)

Because I thinned the carnage red a great deal, it doesn't look much darker than the saffron sunset. Also, for a bit I'm going to switch to just showing the one square we're working on.

Above you can see where I started to lay down some spidery lines to be my red marble veins. I like curvy organic shapes. I've seen marble with very linear patterns as well if you don't want to get fancy. A simple shape to use would be a forked line. Thin the paint a lot. That way if you get a line you don't like, it's easy to dip your brush in water and wipe off the line (well, easier...) For this entire tutorial I just used a #1 Kolinsky sable. Never changed my brush. Just cleaned it in between some of the layers.

I used the brush to do these on some watercolor paper (easier to show washes) See how you can blend from the green to the orange with the cream in the middle? I also put a few pattern options there.

 

Step.. um... 4! Add some white lines. What I liked about this marble pattern is that it showed 2 really cool features of marble- a dark red linear pattern and a lighter white linear pattern. Here's where our pure white comes in. Use a bit of white to make little curlies. They can overlap some of our red pattern. You can barely see them.

Here's a paper example on saffron sunset:

The white can be much fainter.

 

Step 5: Glaze a bit more red into it.

Often marble colors seem to bleed into the others. In some places the lines are sharp. To keep the illusion of marble I've chosen to blend in only one side of my lines. Here I've taken some of the carnage red and glazed a bit on one side of the red lines. Like this:

Next I darkened the red lines a bit to add emphasis to parts of the pattern i wanted to stand out. This is usually an aesthetic decision- do what looks pretty. There isn't a right way to do it.

 

Ok- post break. Just in case my router gives up...

[Nocturne]

Looking great Corporea. Marbles another one of those techniques where there are about as many opinions on how to do it as there are people. As there are so many different marble types it's great to see how different people go about it.

[Corporea]

Moving on! I hate waiting for paint to dry. My last step involved some slow drying glazes, so I took this opportunity to move on the other squares, since the one we've been working on is going to need some layering that all the others will as well.

 

Step 6: Get those other squares done! Starting with the bottom right- Linen white first then I blended in some olive at the top center and saffron at the bottom 2 corners. Note that it is not identical to my other square. We want each to stand out, but the colors will stay the same to make it harmonious.

Next the bottom left square. I tired to do an in progress shot while working fast to keep my paint from drying. It worked! Yay!

See how I put down the olive paint and blended it then blended in the saffron? I'm also using a wash of linen white underneath all of these, just so you know. Last the top square...

Blendy blendy...

 

Step 7: Lets get lines all over this! First with saffron, darken them, add red, etc. etc, just like we did before.

next a few touchups. Here's where we play with our pattern and darken some of the red lines

oooh shiny! I realized after putting in some of my lines some of them looked like they wanted to line up from square to square- that' ok, but better if they're off by just a bit. that way it looks like we used 1 marble slab to make our floor and tried hard to make it look pretty, but we ca still tell we've got individual tiles. So I darkened some of my lines to pull them away from each other.

 

Step 8: wait for paint to dry. I hate waiting. So, I went ahead and started playing with the border squares. I actually don't like the way they turned out and will probably paint over them, but feel obligated to include them since otherwise someone will inevitably ask how they suddenly got painted... I did add some white curlies to all the main tiles here during this process.

Saffron, then some blended in red, the some pure white.

A glaze of saffron, then 2 layers of olive and last a glaze of linen white.

 

Meh. I'll play with it later. But by now my paint had dried on the tiles, so back to work...

[Corporea]

Step 9: Glazing. Lots of glazing. Watch the colors change...

First linen white, then saffron, then olive.

 

After the glazing I went back to add some more saffron and then darken some of my red lines that got a bit washed out.

 

Finally I went back over my white lines and then did a final thicker wash of linen white. Now I've got to go back and fix those edges!

[BloodRose9337]

The marbe looks awsome. I will have to try this out. To bad my current project is orcs. And the lines do look better on the finished piece.

[Thes Hunter]

This marble is beautiful! Thank you for the tutorial! I do now see what you mean about the thin and thicker bits of veins.

[Hibou]

Those look great. Pretty convincing effect.