Art of Texture Day 9 - Walnut Ink on Brown Kraft Paper

Walnut Ink Texture - 4166

I've been wanting to take Kim Klassen's Art of Texture - Secrets Revealed class for quite some time.  This fall, she made it available through her Test Kitchen.  Yahoo!

So far it's been a lot of review on how to use and make brushes in PSE, how to add textures--a lot of things I've learned in Kim's Beyond Layers and Beyond Beyond classes (also currently available through The Test Kitchen).  I didn't feel like I had to take such careful notes on these sections because I'm pretty comfortable with these techniques by now.  Thanks, Kim, for teaching me well in those year-long weekly classes. ;-)

On Day 9, we're finally getting to some mess-making!

In this lesson, Kim suggested we use Walnut Ink on a crumpled piece of brown craft paper.  I'm flush with walnut ink since I made about a gallon of it a few years ago!

The great thing about this lesson is that Kim explains how to do it manually (with real paper and paint/inks) but also how to get a similar digital effect in PhotoShop.  Sorry--I can't tell you exactly how I did it.  If you want to know, you'll have to sign up for the class.

For instance, for the manual version, Kim suggested using drywall tape, but since I didn't have any, I pulled my digital image into PSE and used her Linen texture brush for a similar effect.  It's very subtle, but you can see it if you look closely.   Now, looking around the house, I might have been able to use a strip of shelf-liner as a physical stamp.

I took the picture above while the ink wasn't quite dry--It still showed translucent in some places on the paper.  Some parts even picked up as blue in the photo.  After it dried completely, it wasn't nearly as interesting--pretty uniformly brown now that it's dry.  The paper version is crying out for some additional highlights ...

Interesting thing about the Walnut Ink ...  Kim's link for more info on walnut ink was broken, so I Googled it to see what I could find.  I came up with some new recipes for DIY walnut ink that included rubbing alcohol or Vodka as a preservative.  I totally missed that in 2011 when I was making my batches of walnut ink--though I did use some clove.  Now I want to try both preservatives to see how well they work.  I certainly have enough ink to experiment!

I opened my first batch of walnut ink, and was surprised that it didn't smell bad.  Some of it smelled pretty compost-y when I first made it--due to fermenting the walnuts before making the ink.  The ink seems to have mellowed nicely over time--like a fine wine?  Still--I don't think I'm going to taste it!

The beauty of this is that I can make more physical pages for journal covers, and photograph them and use them perpetually in digital images as texture layers.

More experiments to come!