One day when our Artist to Artist group met back in 2009, we took inspiration from books by Leo Lionni.
The younger set of kids really took to the chameleon story, A Color of His Own. I made a stencil out of cardboard ahead of time so they could sponge paint their own chameleons.
As soon as Grace & I saw the marbled illustrations in Pezzettino and Mr. McMouse we wanted to try that out!!
It ended up being super easy.
Ingredients:
1 cup starch
1/4 tsp. alum
drops of acrylic paint
copy paper
mix the liquid starch and alum, then add the drops of paint. The first photo shows one of our artist swirling the colors.
It’s best to have at least one dark color with your lighter colors.
Swirl them around with a wooden skewer, comb, feather, or tip of a knife.
Then lay your paper on the surface of the starch for just a few seconds then rinse under running tap water.
Let them dry for 2 hours.
One idea for the prepped paper is to cut out letters: 
We will use the other marbleized pages to accent other pictures inspired by Leo Lionni!
from the class~
from the stacks 