A G+ friend asked about marbling gummy while its in a viscous state. However one of the difficulties with gummy is that it pretty much has no viscous state. It’s not like a syrup that thickens as it cools; it goes from runny liquid to a solid in seconds. That solid may be fragile and sticky, but it can’t be poured, piped, or extruded. If you try the latter two, it just breaks into sticky chunks.
But you can mix gummy colours in other ways. First, you can just add liquid to liquid and you’ll get a colour blend. If you don’t mix it much, you’ll get some colour variation.
Second, you can add liquid gummy to already set gummy or vice versa, just the same as pouring a Jell-O mold in layers. As shown in the LEGO Minifig post the other day, warm gummy fuses readily to set gummy.
Here are some photos of one of my early experiments with this, actually using cut-off minifig heads. That’s right: I conducted experiments on severed heads and ate the tasty results. Muahahaha.
For these, I poured some yellow into the smiley face mold and then immediately dropped in some red and green minifig heads. You can see how the first ones melted and spread a bit:
The red spread the most because the yellow was still quite hot when it went in. I could’ve mixed it to make it swirl more.
But on the back you can see that some later additions – made when the yellow was cooling but not yet solid – retained their shape more:
That last green head was added just before the yellow started to solidify, so while it’s fused in, it didn’t spread much at all.
So yes, you can achieve a marbled effect with the gummy by dropping solidified bits into a liquid bit. If you mix them, they may even smear out for more of a gradient.
Incidentally, this self-fusing ability of the gummy is pretty much how the stained glass effect works.
Also, while digging out those pics I found another experiment from the same set that illustrates the bleeding of the edible black ink over 24 hours. Contrast this first photo of a smiley face with the eyes and mouth filled in with black edible marker:
Note the crisp lines and no bleeding. This photo was taken almost immediately after adding the black ink.
…versus the one below, where I did the eyes, one corner of the mouth, and line on the cheek and then left it for 24 hours:
This photo was taken about 24 hours after the ink was added.
This could be used for interesting effects if done deliberately, but you should be aware that it happens so you don’t ruin something like a LEGO minifig with a scary bleedy face. Unless you were making scary-clown LEGO minfigs out of gummy. Which would be awesome. Send me pics!
