What Are You Working On? is for all things hand-made, home-made, and creative in a variety of mediums.
Hello, WAYWO! vgranucci should be by to post the schedule of upcoming diaries in the comments and if you’ve got some creative crafting of your own to share, please consider sharing it here in this forum among friends. I know I’d like to see what you’re working on.
Been over a year since I posted a WAYWO diary. I pondered awhile on just what to share with you folks this time around. Last time my subject was Summer Sketching and I think what’s changed most in my work since then has been that I’ve started using walnut ink in many of my drawings.
It’s a homemade walnut ink that I made myself.
I’d long wanted to try my hand at creating my own ink. One of my favorite artists, a man by the name of Mark A. Nelson, sometimes uses brown inks in his drawings. I love the warmth a brown ink can lend to a subject and it’s reminiscent of old sepia-tone photographs which can give a drawing a sort of instant patina of nostalgia. Okay, it’d suffice to say that I wanted to try things out for myself.
Now, how to get started?
First off, by way of further introduction for those of you who don’t know much about me, I should say that I live in the Czech Republic, I grew up in Wisconsin and moved across the pond over 25 years ago.
Secondly, if you enjoy doing things for yourself and use the internet for advice and recipes to help you along the DIY path to success then you’ll readily find people online who are glad to share their experiences making ink from Black Walnuts.
The third point is that the previous two points present a problem. There aren’t a heck of a lot of black walnut trees growing in Europe. I know of a few, in botanical gardens and the occasional castle courtyard, but there’s not a ready supply of black walnut husks.
I happen to have two English Walnut trees on some land out in the country. Nobody online seemed to be willing to grudgingly admit that making ink from English walnuts was even a posibility. The husks apparently have too little of that renowned staining ability to be taken seriously.
Well, bah and humbug, I say to all that rubbish.
English walnuts will do ya just fine.
In the title image for this diary you can see the white plastic bucket I collected the husks in and left them to rot for several months— probably much longer than necessary. There were a lot of them and, after they’d turned into a dark mush, I added some water, poured them into a big metal pot and began cooking the slurry down.
I occasionally tested it to see how dark it was.
It didn’t take long to boil it down and if I’d had any foresight or brains to speak of I’d have already filtered it at least once sometime before I went and added a bit of Gum Arabic that I’d purchased at my favorite art supply shop (it’s the gum is in the little blue bag above)
It quickly took on the appearance of boiling tar--
And was just as easy as tar to get through the old red stocking I had decided to use to filter it.
Like black-strap molasses. Oof, squeezing it through the stocking one shiny droplet at a time. I felt like an ant milking an aphid.
Too much gum and too much boiling. It was too thick, and too dark.
In other words, it was perfect. Perfectly ready to have a bit of denatured alcohol added to it and a whole lot of water to dilute it down to something of a workable consistency.
Next batch should be easier, but I seem to have made enough brown ink to last me for the next few decades.
I started drawing a graphic novel back in August and decided to try using my combined media technique. I thought it might be different enough to make it something of a curiosity.
And if you’re curious to see what this graphic novel project of mine looks like, well— I’ve been drawing and posting a page each week for 6 weeks now. It’s something of a webcomic and I call it, Gathering Dust.
Please do follow that link and let me know what you think of my efforts. And while you’re here—
Won’t you please share something of your creativity in the comments below? What are you working on?