The downside of this is that you might lose detail in the stamp as the paste could overfill the stamp. In Make Ink , Logan delves into the history of inkmaking and the science of distilling pigment from the natural world. Over the subsequent year and a half, I intimately documented Logan’s creative process, from foraging raw materials to creating coloured inks in his kitchen lab. I need to practice this but it was satisfying and counts as another ‘for’ in the ‘for and against’ getting geese in spring. Purple cabbage is a common natural dye used for fabric, making it just as durable for creating inks.

Logan shares his tips and recipes on hand-making inks and foraging in his book Make Ink, in his newsletter The Colour, and in the documentary The Colour of Ink (out in spring of 2022).Both kinds, if you crinkle up a leaf in your hands, give off a pleasant citrusy smell that is distinctive to the juglans family. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

The pigments he concocts from these humble beginnings are as fun to make as they are eye-opening to work with . We were introduced by a mutual friend who thought we’d be a good creative fit to collaborate on Logan’s then-forthcoming book, Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (2018). Like other readers here, I think the guide was great for making art and projects with others and also learning about the properties of our surroundings, but I’d want more tips on preventing molds and preserving the paint made, especially for the purpose of sharing them with others.

you can learn about the history of ink going back to ancient Chinese ink making until the present day. I'm totally enjoying it but the only issue I have is that the print of the text is a bit on the small size and my eyes are straining to read it.

An even simpler recipe, and one that produces a bold color, is this recipe for Prussian blue, which painters have been using since the early 1700s.Poison sumac has clusters of white or light-green berries that sag downward on its branches, while the red berries of harmless sumac sit upright. Creating this ink was a fun experiment because the oranges themselves were not rich in color; but instead, the ink simply works as an acidic pH shifter.