Is there a digital marbling or ebru program?

There is. Easel by Zaweba, a free and offline painting studio for Windows, includes marbling with four steps: drop, comb, stylus and lift. You drop colour, draw it into patterns with a comb or a stylus, then lift the result off, which follows the order of real paper marbling.

Marbling is the craft of floating colours on a liquid bath, drawing them into patterns, then laying paper on top to pick up the design. Ebru is the Turkish tradition of the art, famous for its flowers and swirling stone patterns. Marbled paper has been used for book endpapers and covers for centuries. It needs a prepared bath, special paints and a fair amount of practice, so a digital version is a handy way to explore it.

The four steps

Drop is where you lay the colours. In real marbling each drop spreads into a circle and pushes the previous colours outward, so a few drops quickly build rings.

Comb draws many parallel lines through the colours at once. Combing in one direction and then the other is how classic patterns are made.

Stylus is a single point for drawing individual shapes, such as the swirls and flowers of ebru.

Lift takes the pattern onto the paper.

Planning a pattern

Start with few colours. Two or three that contrast well are easier to read than many. Colour in Easel mixes like pigment, using the Kubelka-Munk model, and you can choose colours from paint sets, the colour picker or My colours.

Drop the colours in order. Later drops push earlier ones into rings, so the last colour you drop sits in the centre.

Draw slowly. Combing and stylus work are about controlled lines. A single pass of the comb changes everything, so it pays to think before you move.

Lift when you are happy. Undo keeps 80 steps by default, so an experiment that goes wrong can be taken back.

Surfaces and uses

The lifted pattern lands on whatever surface you chose. Easel has 37, including cartridge paper, coloured pastel papers, toned papers, kraft paper and parchment. A slightly toned paper gives a softer, older look; white paper keeps colours bright.

Marbled patterns are useful well beyond the picture itself. They make good backgrounds, book cover designs, endpaper patterns and textures. Export to PNG, JPEG or TIFF at 1x or 2x, and send a PNG on to Paint by Zaweba if you want to crop or arrange it.

Related techniques in Easel

Marbling sits beside monoprint, which uses the palette as the printing plate, and beside decalcomania, which presses a sheet onto wet paint and lifts it. Stamps and collage are there too. All of them are ways of making images by transfer rather than by brush, and they combine well: a marbled sheet can become the base for collage, or a background for a painting.

Watching it back

Easel keeps a frame after every stroke, so the whole making of a marbled pattern can be exported as a time-lapse, as a WebM video or a web page. Marbling is especially satisfying to watch, since the pattern changes so much with each comb.

For anyone curious about ebru or marbling, it is a free way to understand how patterns are built before investing in a real bath and paints.