A bit of history

Right guys, this is the tutorial you have all been asking for!! Ive been innundated with emails and messages asking how to swirl the way I do in my new videos.

I thought that I would give a little background on my road to finding out this method first so you can feel my pain and suffering at the hands of people not willing to share information on this form of painting. A form of painting which, I may add which has been around for thousands of years. One which has books and dvds dedicated to it!! Why people treat it as such a big secret is beyond me (especially as two words in a google search brings up all the info you really need..... "Wood Marbling".)

After writing the tutorials on the Borax method I decided that it simply wasnt good enough to settle with that method as I knew that it wasnt the correct way to swirl, so I set myself the task of finding out the correct way to do it. Armed with my trusty google page and keyboard I set about reading EVERYTHING I could find on swirling whilst filtering out my video from results (that GMC tutorial video is EVERYWHERE).

My first and probobly biggest nudge in the right direction was given in the jemsite forums by no other than Patrick Sims. I have since seen many posts popping up where people are investigating the Carageenan route with no success. They seem to be hitting the same problems I was having; the paint swirl but does not stick to the wood. I tried everything, using Alum, gloss undercoat, matt undercoats before realising it simply wasnt going to happen (that is not to say it wont work, so please feel free to investigate further). So back to the drawing board.

I then tried going do the HOK paints with carageenan, I had some success swirling with these paints but they would skin over far to quickly and the swirls were just no good, even adding reducer didnt seem to help much. I then set about ordering pretty much every type of paint/inks available, usually in black and green. I tried many acrylics which never worked, enamels (yes I went back to humrol even though I knew they were wrong). I did heed the warnings on some paints the didnt work mentioned on Jemsite so didnt bother with them. During this time however a friend and fellow swirler (hey scooter) found out that using enamel based spray cans seemed to work really well. This took me down another route for a week or two and some good results were to be had. This however didnt stop me from thinking about Carageenan methods.

Luckily in one of my many online shopping orders I had purchased some specialized paints. I actually recieved three orders of paints of which these were one and had already tried the other two and gone to bed forgetting to try these other paints. Luckily I remembered a few days later and lo and behold I had found the paints. I could have cried, in fact in the drama I think I may have, frantic texts went out to my missus of which Im sure she was enthralled to hear I had found a magic combination!!