Last week I took a paper marbling class at the same place I took my first bookbinding class, aka The Class That Launched a Whole New Hobby to Shop For. I don’t think paper marbling will be any different, honestly.
It wasn’t the best class–the instructors weren’t all that great at diagnosing issues and defaulted to cheerily saying “It’s a temperamental art!”–but it was good to get an idea of the physicality of it before I splashed out on supplies of my own. And there’s so much info online! As you can see on the papers on the left, my paint stopped sticking to the paper. The class instructors were stumped, but one search got me to a Reddit thread that said the paint probably wasn’t diluted enough. One more search taught me the right way to do a non-pareil pattern (what I was going for with my green-and-blue sample): You have to zig-zag it before you comb it, something the instructors either didn’t know or skipped.
But again, as a way to try something to get an overview of the basics, it was a fine class. Have I spent lots of time reading about marbling online? Yep. Do I have a list of items I want to buy to try it again? You know it.