Shaving Cream Marbling Workshop by Lara Cox

In May, Lara Cox gave a workshop using shaving cream to marble paper. While this is not the traditional marbling we find in books, it is a fun surface design technique. And a bit messy.

Lara Cox demonstrates how to create surface design with shaving cream.

Shaving cream marbling is fairly simple.

Put a layer of shaving cream in a low sided container that is slightly larger than your largest piece of paper. We used baking dishes, plastic container tops, and baking sheets with sides.  Smooth the top.

Put drops of color onto the shaving cream. This could be food color, acrylic inks or diluted acrylic craft paints.

Dots of color are added. 
In this picture, we had already taken one print and just added more color.

 

Use a chopstick or similar instrument and move the colors around on the surface of the shaving cream. The colors stay on the top of the shaving cream and you can form interesting patterns.

These photos show samples of how people moved the colors around.
 If you can see the shaving cream, the print will not have any color in that area.

Instead of a lot of back and forth movement of the color,
 many of our members made star or flower shapes.

Lay a piece of paper onto the surface of the shaving cream making sure not to have any bubbles under the paper.

Remove the paper from the shaving cream and use a straight edge (credit card, squeegee) to remove the cream from the paper. Done!

The paper looks a mess with shaving cream,
 but a couple swipes across the paper with a credit card and the design appears.

This is a TA-DA! moment.

If you notice, the room is not our usual room. We were in a conference room that had carpets on the floor. We swathed the room in white plastic. It was fun!