Ebru art, whose roots date back to 10th century Iran and India, has taken its place among the most popular and aesthetic branches of art over time. Ebru art, which is performed by millions of artists all over the world, is an art with aesthetic concerns, beauty and aesthetic appearance come before anything else for ebru art. In a way, ebru art is an effort to create visually pleasing forms with paints and to reflect your own imagination. Ebru art is a dream-like art obtained by transferring the harmonious dance of paints to paper in an environment called a boat. In this article, we will talk about how to prepare an ebru boat and what to pay attention to.
Ebru may seem like a very difficult, highly professional and really challenging art for beginners. However, once you have the necessary materials and learn how to use them correctly, the rest is up to your imagination. Because ebru art is an art that is completely up to the imagination of the person. Once you have the marbling materials, you can follow the simple steps and make the paints dance in your prepared marbling boat as you wish.
What are the Required Materials for Marbling? What is an Marbling Boat?
The materials required for marbling consist of water, paint, gall, brush, boat and paper. Since we will transfer marbling from water to paper, it is important for the paper to have a high water absorbency. In other words, 80-90 grams of high-absorbency, high-quality pulp papers that can absorb water well are used here. The second important sensitive point to consider when marbling is that the water to be marbling must be lime-free, if you are going to use tap water while marbling, you need to let this water rest for a long time.
The boat is the environment where the marbling takes shape, where the water and tragacanth mixture is located. It should be a few centimeters larger than the length of the paper to be marbling, because the paper to be marbling is a paper with high water absorbency, it will absorb water and therefore swell. Marbling boats are used in 4 – 6 cm deep containers made of wood or any metal. All the materials required for marbling are collected in a marbling vessel and the art of marbling is performed in the marbling vessel. Tragacanth is also used to thicken the water. It is obtained from the stem of a plant from the thorny class called “trachea” that grows naturally in the mountains of Anatolia, Iran and Turkistan. To obtain tragacanth, the branches of the tragacanth plant are drawn in the summer months and the milk flowing from the branches then dries and is collected as bone-colored white particles. It is kept in water without hardness for two days. The tragacanth that has dissolved well is filtered from cloth bags and put into a boat.
Ready-made paints are sold for marbling, these paints are special paints prepared from soil. In the past, master artists made their own marbling paints, there are various methods to make marbling paint. Crushed soil is sifted with the help of a sieve and turned into powder, then filtered in water. Today, powdered paints are sold ready to be crushed.
Although there is no information about the exact source of this interesting mixture, it is known that in ancient times, animals used their gall bladders to ferment cheese in nomadic life. Thus, soil, water and the liquid secreted from the gall bladder come together as the elements of this fine art. However, it is impossible to say anything definitive since the purpose of each invention is different from society to society.