I recently ran an ink-making session in Toronto at the Thinking Through Printing workshop– a sort of colloquium of pressmasters and book-lab directors from across North America. Inks and washes are a good introduction to botanical colors, since they are essentially dyes thickened up with gums and evaporation. The steps are simple, and the first part, at least, will be familiar to anyone who has made coffee or tea. (Indeed, that first step is easy because there’s lots of equipment out there to feed our addiction to caffeine):
- Hot solvent extraction: boil in water to extract chromophore ( <– a word meaning “color carrying molecule”) and filter. For events like these, I simply place a low-form borosilicate funnel in a 400ml beaker, and fold a conical coffee filter to fit,
- Mordant: add a metal-salt mordant (usually alum, but sometimes iron sulfate or copper sulfate),
- and Thicken: add a gum binder and return to heat.
The only thing here that is additional to dyeing is the third step; though a dyebath often involves other reagents, and though dyers sometimes mordant the cloth rather than the dye, an ink made this way is essentially just a dye thickened up. Were we dyeing, we’d immerse a fiber in that mordanted solution, then hang it and wait for it to dry. Contrariwise, were we to make a pigment from our chromophore, we would precipitate the mordanted solution, either with a strong alkali (making a lake), or by bonding the chromophore to something like chalk (making what was sometimes called a “pink”)– then we’d filter and dry to retain only the pigment. Thickening with gum makes a super stainy ink– basically a dye in a form that can be put where you want it– which workshop participants can bottle up and take home– or just write or paint in their notes or whatever.
It’s maybe the seventh or eighth time I’ve run a workshop on inks– but the first time that we managed to squeeze it down to a frenetic ninety minutes. We worked in pairs to make seven inks, all from natural dye sources. Not all were eighteenth-century inks, but all were inks made from eighteenth-century colors; five were from contemporary British recipes. Together, they not only formed an introduction to ink-making from plants, but also provided a snapshot of British empire in its earliest moments.
I’m including the recipes here. Since they’re really the recipes of Robert Dossie (eighteenth-century polymath) and some of his near-contemporaries, please feel free Dossie’s Brazilwood Redto use them however you like.
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Red from brazilin (brazilwood from Brazil)
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Red from carminic acid (cochineal from the Yucatan)
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Purple from hematoxylin (logwood from the Caribbean)
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Yellow from rhamnetin (Southern European buckthorn)
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Olive from quercetin (from North American black oak)
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and 7. Black from oak tannins (galls from the Levant), done two different ways– a simple oak-gall ink, and an improved oak-gall ink, involving more reagents.
When I do this activity with students, I typically ask them to do a bit of research on their inks while they’re boiling and thickening up– then use their inks to make something related to what they’ve learned. Students sometimes produce maps, write recipes, or draw the plants or animals which rendered up their dyes.
Equipment (per workstation):
- Hotplate
- 400ml and 250ml borosilicate beaker
- low-form borosilicate funnel (or some other device to hold a coffee filter)
- glass stirrer
- coffee filters
- safety equipment (safety glasses, nitrile gloves, and aprons)
Let me add a couple of safety notes. Two of the reagents used here are classed as hazards. The copper sulfate used in Dossie’s olive drab, and the iron sulfate used in both black inks are mildly toxic if swallowed, and are irritants if they come in direct contact with the eyes. It is a requirement of most labs to have the Material Safety Data Sheets on-hand while using either Iron Sulfate or Copper Sulfate (links to Fisher Scientific, which is the supplier we use)– and of course use safety glasses and wash well with water and soap after any of these recipes.