{"id":872,"date":"2026-06-12T14:25:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T14:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/?p=872"},"modified":"2026-07-15T21:06:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T21:06:26","slug":"an-ink-making-workshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/an-ink-making-workshop\/","title":{"rendered":"An Ink-Making Workshop"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently ran an ink-making session in Toronto at the Thinking Through Printing<\/a> workshop– a sort of colloquium of pressmasters and book-lab directors from across North America.\u00a0 Inks and washes offer an especially good introduction to botanical colors, since they can be made quickly, and involve the same first steps you’d use to make a dye or a pigment.\u00a0 They are essentially just dyes thickened up with gums and boiled down.\u00a0 The steps are simple, and the first part, at least, will be familiar to anyone who has made coffee or tea.\u00a0 (Indeed, that first step is easy because there’s lots of equipment out there to feed our addiction to caffeine.)\u00a0 They are these:<\/p>\n

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  1. Hot solvent extraction: boil in water to extract chromophore ( <– a word meaning “color carrying molecule”) and filter.\u00a0 For events like these, I simply place a low-form borosilicate funnel in a 400ml beaker, and fold a conical coffee filter to fit, but you could use a pour-over setup or whatever will hold a paper filter.<\/li>\n
  2. Mordant: add a metal-salt mordant (usually alum, but sometimes iron sulfate or copper sulfate) by stirring.<\/li>\n
  3. and Thicken: add a gum binder and return to heat.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The only thing here that is additional to dyeing is the third step.\u00a0 Were we dyeing, we’d simply immerse fibers or textiles in the mordanted solution you get in step 2– then hang it up and wait for it to dry.\u00a0 Contrariwise, were we to make a pigment, we’d take the mordanted solution that results in the second step, and precipitate it with a strong alkali (making a lake), or bond it to something like chalk (making what was sometimes called a “pink”).\u00a0 They we’d filter and dry the resulting pigment.\u00a0 The third step basically just makes a dye in a form that can be put where you want it.\u00a0 And it’s also something workshop participants can bottle up and take home– or just write or paint in their notes or whatever.<\/p>\n

    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.\u00a0 We worked in pairs to make seven inks, all from natural dye sources.\u00a0 Not all were eighteenth-century inks, but all were inks made from eighteenth-century chromophores; five were from contemporary British recipes.\u00a0 Together, they not only formed an introduction to ink-making from plants, but also provided a snapshot of British empire in its earliest moments.<\/p>\n

    I’m including the recipes here.\u00a0 Since they’re really the recipes of Robert Dossie (eighteenth-century polymath) and some of his near-contemporaries, please feel free to use them however you like.<\/p>\n

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    1. \n
      Red from brazilin<\/a> (brazilwood from Brazil)<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
    2. \n
      Red from carminic acid<\/a> (cochineal from the Yucatan)<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
    3. \n
      Purple from hematoxylin<\/a> (logwood from the Caribbean)<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
    4. \n
      Yellow from rhamnetin<\/a> (Southern European buckthorn)<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
    5. \n
      Olive from quercetin<\/a> (from North American black oak)<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
    6. \n
      and 7. Black from oak tannins (galls from the Levant), done two different ways– a simple oak-gall ink<\/a>, and an improved oak-gall ink<\/a>, involving more reagents.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      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.\u00a0 Students sometimes produce maps, write recipes, or draw the plants or animals which rendered up their dyes.<\/p>\n

      Equipment (per workstation):<\/p>\n