My friend, Bill, wanted to see how marbling was done so when I was in the studio last weekend, I had Emmett video me doing my favorite pattern: flame. Now, I'm not one to claim to be an expert marbler and I'm sure there are expert marblers out there who would love to critique my moves. Quite frankly, I'm fine with that. The more I learn, the better I'll become. However, I decided a long time ago when I first started marbling seriously that I was going to do what felt right. I'm not much for trying to reproduce 17th and 18th century patterns using the exact colors of the time period. And while I love, love, love to look at these marbled pieces, I don't extract much joy from actually producing them. So I do my own thing and sometimes its a variation of a traditional pattern. A student in my Campbell Folk School marbling class kept "swishing" her strokes and it would make us all laugh. We dubbed it the "Trish Twist." But you know what...I loved her pieces, tradition be damned! So, while I'm 99.9% sure I'm doing the traditional Flame pattern right in this video, for some reason it doesn't look like my lovely flame patterns of the past. Whatever. In the end, the final piece looked beautiful to me...and that's all that really matters.

Here ya go, Bill...a marbling demo done just for you!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOKNxHSNjq4&w=560&h=315]