Tutorial: Quick Marbling Effect

Here's a tutorial on how to do a quick and dirty marble effect.

Real quick and easy here folks.  You can create this effect on larger scale pieces using feathers and glaze medium, but as deadlines loom, and due to smaller scales, sometimes you gotta make do.

I started by priming my piece, then basecoating it in my color of choice. For this, I wanted a "white" marble, so I basecoated with GW's Celestra Gray, a few light coats, and I did the trim in the darker Mechanicus Gray:

 

From there, wait for it to dry thoroughly, then I used a was brush to push around some black wash (Badab black in this case). Important note...don't treat this like a normal wash. While it will get in the crevices to accentuate shadows, it also is serving as part of the effect. So, I made sure to do something between a heavy wash, and just a spot wash, making sure to drag the wash and "pull" it across and around in a pattern you'd find on marble. Brush strokes and streaks are wanted here, unlike almost every other time you do a wash:

 

Finally, I drybrushed on Ulthuan Gray. I used varying amounts of paint on my brush, because like the wash before it, this isn't a "true" drybrush. I actually concentrated on getting in some of the cracks and crevices. Sometimes I had a lot of paint on my brush for an opaque effect, sometimes very little. The point is to make it look random. After it dried, I kicked it up with a satin varnish, and voila, quick and dirty marbling!