Walnut Ink Samples

 

Walnut Ink with Copper Watercolor.

 

Back in 2011, I made a BIG batch of walnut ink.  A lifetime supply!

There are several trees in the neighborhood, so it was easy to forage the walnuts.

It has aged very well!  I remember when I made it, it had a distinct compost-y smell.  It's much more pleasant to be around now -- esp. with that bit of clove as preservative. 

Very easy to write with the new feather pen.

 

 

I experimented with the preservative: rubbing alcohol vs. vodka.

I also experimented with papers ...

On the catalog cards, it feathered and ran, where it seemed to behave better on the watercolor paper. 

It showed a similar feathering effect on the catalog card.

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!

Walnut Ink

The first batch of walnut ink I started more than a month ago is finally ready to write with.
With my new glass dip pen, I was able to do this entire feather with a single dip in the ink pot. Real walnut ink works much better than the Tea Ink I played with in August.


Back in late July, the walnuts in the neighborhood started falling. So I collected a bagful. It's not the actual nut or nut shells you need for ink. It's the green husks like these. I left them in the garage to ripen and "age" for a few weeks. This is the basic recipe I used.


Then I sat out in the yard (wearing rubber gloves and an apron) and broke them up with a regular old hammer on a flat rock. In this batch, the actual nuts and shells were still soft and green, so they mashed down pretty easily with the rest of the brown matter.


I threw them in the pot as I smashed them on the rock. Then I added enough water to cover the solid matter, threw in a few rusty nails, and started simmering. I thought it would take a lot longer than an hour to simmer away 1/2 the liquids. But that was it--just an hour.


The spoon was stained a rich brown color. I used a brown paper shopping bag to protect the counter next to the stove. I was also surprised at how easy the cleanup was. Although the ink stains hands and skin, it washed off of the counters and sinks easily--while it was still wet.


Here you can get a better idea of the rich red-brown color the un-fermented ink has. This is what's left in the pot after straining out the solids and decanting the liquids into a jar so it can ferment in a dark cupboard for 1 month.


These are the solids left after the first batch of ink. I was able to go another 2 rounds with this batch of walnut husks. Each successive batch seems a little lighter than the previous one.



This is a small jar of the finished ink. It's so dark, it's difficult to get a good picture, but here it is. I shook it up so you could see some of the ink run down the glass. The bubbles leave a neat pattern, too!

The clove oil is a great suggestion, as the ripened walnut ink tends to smell like compost or manure. Definitely smells like something down on the farm.

I tried a second round with another batch of walnuts. This batch was more ripe--when I smashed the hulls off, the nuts were hard and easy to pick out. I just wanted the husks. When I started simmering this batch, I added a few Anise seeds to make it smell a little better.

Now what to do with all this brown gold?