How To Achieve A Spray Paint Marble Effect

I’m always on the lookout for new and improved spray paint art ideas. Spray paint is an affordable product option in the art world, and it can be used for a multitude of purposes. One of those purposes is using the paint to create a spray paint marble effect. This blog post is dedicated to demonstrating this marbling technique. If you’ve been looking for new ways to achieve a marbled look, then check out this idea for a marbling paper. Reading this post could be a great way to get your creative juices flowing!

Many people are familiar with the nail polish marbling technique, where you use nail polish and water to create a marble finish. Water marbling works like this: you take a big, shallow container (like a Rubbermaid bin), and you fill it with a few inches of water. Then you drop/drizzle your paint onto the surface of the water, and finish by pressing your paper directly into the water.

While nail polish marbling does give you the desired results, polish is not the most economical medium to work with. Nail polish isn’t cheap, and you never know when you might find yourself limited by the available color selection. Now, what product doesn’t have those cons? Spray paint! This paint will give you a greater spread of color when you’re marbling paper, as opposed to nail polish which tends to only give streaks of color. You can find Montana Gold Acrylic Professional Spray Paint right here at Cheap Joe’s. Choose from over 80 beautiful, vibrant colors for your next project!

Interested in learning more about this amazing product? Here’s a video of Joe Miller (yes, Cheap Joe himself) demonstrating his watercolor painting on TerraSkin paper:

Transcription of “Why You Should Try Mitz Terraskin Paper”
Hi, I’m Joe from Cheap Joe’s Art Stuff. We have a very dear artist friend who’s fighting for her life with cancer. We really care and love her. Perhaps you or a loved one are going through a rough time also. We know there are many artists and non-artists in the same situation. So we’re dedicating this time to all of you. Here at Cheap Joe’s, we sincerely believe art is healing. Whether you call what I will do here today art or simply playing, please know it’s dedicated to you. We pray and hope for your well-being.

I want to tell you about a new paper that I’ve discovered. It’s not really new, it’s been out for a while, but I’ve had so much fun with it lately and I would like to show you because I think you will just love it. It’s called TerraSkin, and this is the TerraSkin paper. It’s white just like any other paper, except it’s unique in that this paper is actually made from stone. I should have brought a rock to hold up, but it’s made from stone, and there’s no water, there’s no bleach. It’s called cradle-to-cradle because it’s totally non-polluting. It’s acid-free, it’s archival, and no trees were used in its production. It’s good for oil painting, acrylic, charcoal, watercolor, pen and pencil, ink, silverpoint, and paper cutouts. It is water resistant, tear resistant, acid-free, no fiber. Accurate cutting, precise scoring, crisp embossing, and it comes in many weights.

I really, really enjoyed painting on it lately. I’ll never desert my watercolor paper like Kilimanjaro or those papers that we love, but this is so much fun as kind of a change, kind of a diversion from what we’ve been doing.

It comes in sheets that are a little larger than a full sheet of watercolor paper. I think it’s 28 by 32, maybe. Anyhow, it’s a wonderful size and you can cut it so easily. This is it, but you just cannot tear it. It is tough as can be.

I’ve drawn out this little sketch that you can see over here on the side of the table. I did a quick, quick sketch, it doesn’t have everything in it even because this is going to be a fairly quick demo. You don’t need a long demo on this or that sort of thing, but I’ve put this little duck decoy in the bottle and the little artificial “berry tree” (I call it) I found. So this is a pencil sketch.

Now the one thing that’s very difficult to do is to erase all the way back to white. So I let some of my lines be part of the painting I’m doing. I don’t worry about that. But if you want to erase it, just use a white plastic eraser or the kneaded gum eraser. If you really want to get it up, then you need to go to the Paint Erase, which is this rejuvenating sponge, and dampen the sponge a little bit, and then come in here and just scrub, and it’ll come right up. It does change the surface of the paper just a little, or the Terraskin, but it doesn’t affect it once you start putting color on it.

I love using pen and ink, and different pens, and what I’ve learned on Terraskin is that you can use a waterproof pen. As you watercolor, or add color to it, it won’t bleed. You can also use a pen that is not waterproof, and it’ll tell you generally on the pen. There are lots of them out there that are not waterproof, and so this one is not. This is a Tradio pen that is not waterproof, so I’m going to just do a touch of drawing with it, and then you’ll see what it does in the final painting. I’ll put just maybe a little bit here and there, and then I’m also going to do a waterproof pen, and I’m going to add just a little bit of detail here with the waterproof pen and you will be able to see again kind of what it does because it won’t run and it’ll stay just like it is here on this. After it’s done, we can come back and add some lines and details to it even then.

So now we’re ready to paint. I’m using these Pseudo Sable brushes. I wanted to call them “Psycho Pseudo” because I’m crazy about them. They’re a wonderful brush; they were made to imitate sable, but they actually act almost exactly like sable. It’s a nylon product. They hold a great point, they hold a lot of colors, and they’re a lot less expensive than sable. I’m Cheap Joe, and although we sell lots of sable brushes, I love them. This is a very economical route for a great brush. Pseudo Sable, Miller’s Pseudo Sable, it’s called. They come in flats and rounds and everything, so just a lot of fun.

I’m going to start off with this duck. I’m going to change it, this duck that we’re going to do here is called a redhead, and I’m a skeptic. You can see the brush; I’ve got it loaded up here, and I’m simply going to come in and put in some color here on this little duck. I don’t know if you can tell now, hopefully, you can, that it’s just holding exactly where it is there.

So here’s the head of the duck, and I can come in here with some darker color. The red I used was “Joe’s Red.” I’ll come in here with a little dark color because the light is going to be coming this way, so I’m just going to add a little darker color right in there. Then I’m going to add some real dark color right down here because this duck has some real dark color right in there. With this, just darken it right up. And then back here in the rump, this color I’m using is Cheap Joe’s American Journey “Midnight Blue.” It’s actually called “Indanthrone Blue” by other companies. It’s really dark, and stays really dark; a gorgeous color. We probably are going to change the name to “Indanthrone Blue” so people will recognize it that way, and we’ll put “Midnight Blue” in parenthesis or something. So there becomes my duck.

Now, down here where the ink is, right along the bottom, is the little body of the duck. The bill is blue, so it could be a blue bill duck, it could be a red-headed blue bill duck, it could be a red-headed, black-breasted, red-eyed, blue, oh, I don’t know what it’s going to be. But anyhow, it’s going to be our duck, and that’s the way we’re going to proceed with it.

This little vase back here, the light’s coming this way, so it’s going to be darker right here on this. We’ll make it a little bit blue, like that. The wine bottle that I have in the display is green, so I’ll pick up some of my yellow, which happens to be “Joe’s Yellow,” and I know you’re saying, “What a coincidence.” And there’s the green with the “Midnight Blue” to make that darker color. So I’ll come right in here with this, and I’ll leave a little light streak on this because glass has a little light streak on it. Then I’ll change the color to a different color here on this side, and I have to go around the label because it’s a light-colored label, of course. I’m adding some more yellow again, cleaning my brush, and then getting more blue in there, a little more of that darker “Midnight Blue” which is a pretty color.

Charles Reed, I took his workshop back in the summer this year, and I just loved it. I learned so much, and he got me all excited about painting and doing this sort of thing with all these wonderful little accidents that look like accidents, and yet he thought each one of them out. They were just wonderful, and we had a great time painting together. That is the idea here.

This is a fly, I tied flies when I was a boy for trout fishing. Loved it, had so much fun. And this is my signature fly; a royal coachman. I just loved that fly. This is a box of flies over here, so I’ll put a little bit of this in there for that. Then I’m going to pick up some of this wonderful dark blue again and finish up this fly kind of like that. It’s got some what we call “hackle,” and hackle came from wrapping a feather around the hook so that it stood up, and that’s what makes a trout fly float. I tell people that I was born with a fly rod in my hand instead of a silver spoon in my mouth because I just love to fish, and still do.

So that’s the process. I put tape around this whole border here and I’ll go ahead and add a little bit of color along the border to finish the painting. I brought a finished painting to show you because it’s the same process that we’re going through here. It’s kind of a lot of negative painting. Then we’ll spatter a little bit in there. Let’s put some shadow on this side of the fly box and kind of leave that. My friend Charles would say you can’t leave too much white, and I believe it. His paintings are just so much fun, and to watch him paint was so much fun also. We have a few of these berries up here on this little limb, and then I can be careful and adamant or I can be loose, and I tend to be real loose as you can tell. I just don’t get caught up in too much detail. So this gives the little duck a red eye.

Now I’m going to add a nice color, this is Quinacridone “Burnt Scarlett,” for the handle of this fly rod right here. Whew, isn’t that beautiful? I love that color, Quinacridone “Burnt Scarlett.” I’ll leave a little side, and the rod itself is going to be that same color, so I’ll put some in there and leave a little light in there. It’s a bamboo fly rod, very old, and was used by Isaac Walton. I’m kidding you. He was kind of the father of trout fishing.

The fly reel is right here, and then we can put in some of the brush, my goodness, I’m about to forget the brush. This is the psycho, psycho sable brush with a pretty blue handle. And then we have some shadow in here, like this sort of thing, and we can spatter a little bit of that in there, and then this line around here.

Now I’m going to add just a little bit of color up in these corners right here, maybe right in here even a little bit. Just to show you, after I take the tape off, what we have. We probably want to come in here with some color. Okay. Oh, I know what I forgot. This little fly box right here has Cheap Joe’s logo in it, I have to put it in there. There we go, there it is.

Now then, it will dry in just no time because the paint’s setting up pretty much on the surface. So I’ll go ahead and take the tape off, and you’ll see what we’ve got. It’s crept under there just a little bit only. But again, that kind of adds interest to it. Rather than just a dead straight line, it gives us a little bit of variety in that. And that’s what we have, and it’s not near finished yet, but you can see how quick it is, how bright the color is, it’s just a really fun piece of paper.

I’d like to show you a few finished pieces if I can. I have two little demos that I’ve prepared for this little play demo, or serious art demo play. These are my fishing things, and I try to do things that are close to me, and these all are. This is a shorebird in here, but I wanted to show you, that this is a water-soluble pen right here. If I come in here with just water, I can put a really nice little shadow under here. This is just water, and that’s a water-soluble pen. They come in a lot of different names. You can buy them, and we have them, of course. Here’s waterproof, I’ll go over this one and nothing happens. So that’s the difference there in that. It has its place. I don’t know what I put there, oh, this is water-soluble, here are the daisies. Better be careful. I can pick up a little of this dark, and make that. I can put the apple in there, in this bag.

So with the water-soluble pen, we can do a value study just by using the ink that’s on the paper there. Isn’t that fun? Look at that. And you get a value study. If we want to add color, of course, red’s always a wonderful color to add. We can add some color to it. We could add some yellow to the lemon here, and it turns it kind of lemony-yellow. We can put a fly here, and a little bit of red here on this right here, and a little bit of dark for the hook and where it’s tied up. And there we have the fly that way. I just love this paper, it’s so much fun.

This is a finished piece that I brought to show you, with the duck. I have a trout that’s on a pedestal, a wooden carved trout. And of course, the flies in the foreground. The background is pretty much colored, so I think that when I matte it (put a matter on it) it’ll look totally different.

Here is one that I did while thinking of a golfing friend of mine. It was a golf pro here, the first lefty to win a tournament, named Sam Adams. A great friend. So I have the golf club and of course, the bird, and over here is the green that he’ll be going to, and the different things that you can see in there.

What I like about this painting is the size of the pencil. Look how big this thing is! It must be that big around compared to the wine bottle. It’s half as big around as the wine bottle. I don’t get caught up, I’m just having fun. If it’s too big, it’s too big.

These are Christmas cards that I’ve prepared. This is one totally on the Terraskin paper, and again, it’s going to be for one of my trout fishing buddies. I have another one that I did on the same paper, the Terraskin, but it’s a five-and-a-half by seven. I’m going to mount it on this bright red piece of paper and put the message inside. Here’s one that I have drawn out on the Terraskin a little larger, ready to paint and do the background with it. This one, and of course, as you can see, none of these are matted yet. I have the corners drawn out. This one is for a writer friend of mine who’s written books, and so this is going to be his Christmas card.

Here’s a larger one. This is nearly a full sheet, I think I cut some of it off. I really should have a matte to show you because I love matte. They define your painting and make a place out of it. But anyhow, there’s a full sheet. They’re easy to do. They’re quick, you get these wonderful color expressions in them. And then I brought one more to show you. This one’s a little brighter color. The color is going to be just as bright as you want it to be because it’s going to stand right up there on top. I’ve scrubbed out some of this because I didn’t like what I had going on in the water reflection.

So that’s the Terraskin paper. We have it here at Cheap Joe’s. It’s not expensive, and it’s just really, really fun. I think you’ll enjoy it. Thank you so much for being with me today, and Happy Art!

Back to the Demo
Okay, now we’re finally getting to the fun part!

Demonstrating the Technique
Working at Cheap Joe’s has allowed me to partake in some wonderful opportunities, but there are also some amazing, unique perks to the job. For example, I’m able to work on personal projects in our Workshop, where there is a projector that allows others to see everything that the instructor is doing on their desk. Megan, Cheap Joe’s Search Engine Optimizer, helped me out by taking photos of the projector as I completed this project, so now I have some awesome action shots to show you along the way. Now, let’s get to the demonstration!

I began by filling this plastic concrete mixing tub with approximately three inches of water. It’s important that you use a wide container because you need plenty of room to lay down the paint. This is especially true if you’re using full sheets of paper, or larger objects in general.

Did you notice my mistake? I forgot to wear gloves! You should consider wearing some if you decide to try out this spray paint marble effect. The spray paint will stick to anything dry, so your skin is a perfect culprit. Our Montana Disposable Latex Gloves are a great option due to their micro-grip system on the palms of the gloves. Besides protecting your skin, these gloves will also keep the spray paint cans from sliding out of your hands as you work. Pretty useful, right?

In this photo, you can see that I put down a relatively solid layer of our Montana Gold Acrylic Professional Spray Paint in the shade “Blue Magic.” Talk about a gorgeous blue hue!

Next, I added in some intermittent splashes of Montana Gold Acrylic Professional Spray Paint in the shade “Malachite.”

I focused on making the layer of “Blue Magic” more consistent, whereas I got a bit creative with the “Malachite” by adding it into the mix in bursts. I think this livened up the design.

If you know me, then you know I love a good gold accent color. So of course, I had to find a way to incorporate some into this project. There was no way I could pass on the Montana Gold Acrylic Professional Spray Paint in “Goldchrome (Metallic).” Trust me, it’s the most vivid metallic gold I’ve ever seen in spray paint.

I bet you were wondering where the paper was going to come in, and it’s right now. For this project, I opted for the Mitz TerraSkin Multimedia Art Paper in the Multimedia Bloc format. I chose paper because it’s a great size (9”x12”), and because of its many impressive qualities. If you haven’t heard of TerraSkin paper, then you’ll be shocked to learn that it’s made out of stone. Seriously, stone! This means it’s water and tear-resistant; the perfect choice for this project, where we’re literally soaking the paper in water. Even better, this paper is completely bleed-proof, acid-free, and eco-friendly.

I pressed my paper right into the surface of the water

I went ahead and pressed the paper directly into the surface of the water.

Then I raised the paper out of the water.

I didn’t get the paper completely covered, but it’s fine. We can always go back in and repeat this step.

When I submerged the paper for the second time, I made sure to drag the paper all over the water’s surface so it would collect the spray paint.

This time, I got a bit more coverage, but I still wasn’t satisfied. It’s best to let the first layer dry completely before going in for another dip, so I did that for this one. It turned out pretty well!

When the paper was completely dry (the paper was only wet with water, the paint itself was not wet), I proceeded to press it into a batch of only “Malachite” and “Goldchrome,” which resulted in this beautiful design.

In this photo, you can see where the two layers meet.

Here’s a close-up of a gorgeous little golden mountain range. This formed because air pockets were trapped between the paper and the paint.

The Second Paper

Now we’re moving on to the second piece of paper. When I went to prepare the water for this next piece, I noticed that there were still a couple of clusters of paint left over from the first paper. This wasn’t a problem for me because I was using the same colors for all of the sheets, but it’s something to be aware of.

Like the first paper, I went in with the “Blue Magic” color to create a base layer. Remember: the color you lay down first is going to be the most prominent one on your paper.

This time, I decided to spray the base layer on a little less thick. I wanted to see how it would look if other colors got more of an opportunity to shine through the base layer.

Here, I’m spraying on the color “Malachite,” the same as the first paper.

Finally, I put some gold in as the finishing touch.

At this point, multiple people had gathered in the Workshop to watch my project come to life. One person asked an important question: why wasn’t I marbling it with a paperclip or a toothpick, as you do with nail polish marbling? With spray paint marbling, even the smallest pieces of paint sit at the surface of the water and can clump together if they touch each other while they’re still in the water. You can see an example of this in the photo, in the corner I’m pointing at. It’s vital that you keep the paint as spread out as possible while it’s still on the water, that way the clumping will only happen on the paper.

Here’s what I prepared for the second paper.

Just like the first time, I took the piece of paper and pressed it onto the water’s surface, allowing some paint to adhere to the paper.

I gently moved the paper around so it could collect more spray paint.

And this is what I ended up with!

I loved this paper; there were so many different textures and layers in the colors.

The Third Paper
I decided I wanted to switch things up a bit for my last piece of paper.

There was still leftover paint from previous batches, which was fine. I went in with “Malachite” as the base layer.

Here, you can see that I’d created a nice gradient.

Now I’m going in with “Blue Magic.”

And of course, lots of gold.

Next, I press the paper into the water.

Then I swirl it around, giving the paint a chance to stick.

I might have dragged it around for a good chunk of time.

And here we have the finished product! I wasn’t too fond of the huge piece of white on the left side of the paper, but the rest of the sheet was stunning.

You can see all the bulky ridges of color in this close-up!

The little flecks of gold throughout the piece elevate the design to another level, especially with the swirling greens and blues. Even the air bubbles make for an interesting layer! You definitely can’t get results like these with nail polish marbling!

I had a ton of fun working on this blog project, and I’m excited to try out this technique again in the future. I can add even more layers of color next time because the TerraSkin paper handled it so well! For now, I’ll be admiring my beautiful pieces of artwork and deciding if I want to make them into bookmarks, or cards, or leave them as they are.

I hope you enjoyed following along with me as I tested out this marbling technique. I highly recommend you add this concept to your list of spray paint art ideas. You’ll end up with some truly stunning results!