Marbling a fireplace

Hello my friends,

Before I had my 6 month absence I already had a few posts waiting to be finished and published. This is one of them. 

This fireplace was a white resin, thirteen in a dozen affair. Found second hand for a few euro's. Being a mass produced item does not change the fact that I like the ornate rocaille decorations a lot. Perhaps painting it in a  sandstone colour was all it needed to be pretty..... but I wanted try to do some more marbling. 

There are several different techniques to achieve different marbling effects. I tried not to plan to much this time. I tried to keep the proces spontanious. So spontanious that I forgot to take pictures of the first phases. 

So I started with a dark blue and black mixture and dotted the resin here and there. Followed by some smaller patches of crimson. The second phase was covering the whole fireplace in a translucent dark blue. A mixture of indigo and a fair amount of acrylic medium. The picture above does not show the different hues of blue very well. But please believe me when I say it was clearly visible to the naked eye.

For the third stage I mixed a medium grey with titanium white and mars black. Added a little amount of burnt sienna to give it a warmer hue. Then I brushed it on here and there with a fairly dry brush. Tapping onto the fireplace. Carefully avoiding to make a regular or symetrical pattern. That is the only real taboo in marbling. Irregularity is key. Wether it is a flamed, spotted, veined or other type of marble, it is never the same.

The only symetrical patterns in real marble are obtained when two slabs are cut of a block and the are placed directly oposite, mirroring each other as the two pages of an open book. Hence the nam 'a livre ouvert' for sawing and laying marble tiles in that way. But symmetry may never occur in a single piece or slab. 

I wanted a heavily veined marble on this fireplace. So with an undiluted titanium white and my finest brush I added squigly veins all over the surface of the fireplace. 

The marble effect improves by adding more and more layers, but I quite liked it by now and decided to stop here, after only four layers of paint.

In the picture above you can see that the veins run roughly in the same direction. But never straight and never really parallel. They split in two, or dissapear under the surface, or simply starts somewhere. 

The grey and blues complement each other nicely. Here and there the crimson still shimmers through as was intended. And the white veins form a contrast to the other colours.

And here is the finished fireplace. The ornamental back plate and the andirons with classical vases are the subject of some of my next posts. DHN magazine asked me to make little series in three installments on making antique fireplace miniatures like curfews, andirons and back plates. 

Until next time!

Huibrecht