Ebru, whose roots date back to 10th century Iran and India, has taken its place among the most popular and aesthetic art branches over time. Ebru art is an effort to create visually pleasing forms with paints and to reflect your own imagination. It is a dream-like art obtained by transferring the harmonious dance of paints to paper in an environment called a boat. The basic materials required for making ebru are water, paint, oud, brush, boat and paper.
Like ebru art itself, every material used in its production is special. Special hand-made brushes made of rose branches are used when making ebru. Rose branches collected while they are fresh are wrapped with special threads, flattened and dried. After the drying process, a flat and light ebru brush body is obtained. Since rose branches have a highly fibrous and flexible structure, they retain their flexibility against brush strokes when dry. Since ebru art is an art that makes paints dance on a boat with the help of a brush, flexibility and aesthetics are very important here. Alternatives such as laurel branches have also been tried and achieved success in order to make marbling brushes, but in general, rose branches are often preferred for quality marbling art brushes.
Brushes made of horsehair wrapped around a rose branch in a way that the middle of the brush remains empty. Here, the hairs used for the tip of the brush are obtained entirely from horsetail. In response to the question of why horsehair is used, the most important feature of horsehair is that it does not hold the paint on itself, the paint flows from the brush and dances in the marbling basin. Horsetail hairs are wrapped around the rose branch by tying a fisherman’s knot with fishing line. By using brushes of different thicknesses and lengths, it is possible to put paint in the basin to the desired extent and control the paints. The feature of the fisherman’s knot is that its knot is inside. In this way, the knot does not melt because it does not come into contact with the paint and water, and the paint does not stay on the knot and allow an unexpected paint splash other than the impact.
How is Marbling Art Made?
Although the medium recipe for making marbling art varies from master to master, the generally accepted recipe is to put 2 tablespoons of tragacanth in 2 liters of water. Tragacanth will help increase the density of the water and thus the paint will dance harmoniously in the water. The tragacanth mixture in the trough should be kept for at least 2 days and then this mixture should be filtered with the help of a tragacanth straining bag. When everything is ready, add the gall and earth paint to the filtered water. Now it is your imagination’s turn to make the paints dance magically! You can shape the paints in the water with the help of a special marbling brush made of horsehair, and you can reflect your own style by creating aesthetic forms that will please your eye. As a final stage, you should bring the high-absorbent quality pulp paper produced specifically for marbling into contact with the marbling in the trough and make sure that the paint has transferred to the paper and then pull it out in one go.