Natural Inks and the Artists Who Use Them
Natural and Obscure Ink Roundup
Today’s issue brings you a small collection of inspiring artists and inks that
Ink Made from Air Pollution
The first interesting ink is made from the carbon in the air. Produced by Graviky Labs, the ink is literally carbon black. Graviky Lab’s founder originally started researching ink from air pollution while he was studying at MIT. Carbon black is a common pigment for blacks and is usually extracted from fossil fuel sources. The same is true of AIR-INK, however it’s been pulled from the atmosphere instead of the ground. This means it’s using already burned fossil fuels to create it, instead of raw materials.
While technically, the ink is removing emissions from the atmosphere, there’s no way the ink can truly scale up to make a significant or meaningful impact on climate crisis. That’s alright though, it doesn’t have to solve climate change to be an interesting and impressive result!
Each marker holds about 30 milliliters of AIR-INK, which is equivalent to approximately 45 minutes of diesel car pollution.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
AIR-INK is available in marker and screen print ink form. Kinda tempted to buy a marker now haha!
To learn more about carbon black inks and sustainable alternatives, check out this issue on Algae ink!
Algae Ink: The best plant-based ink around?
Algae Ink promises high-contrast blacks, carbon sequestration, and light-fastness, but is it too good to be true?
Jeppe Ringsted’s Work with Soot in Water
By using the techniques of suminagashi (Japanese marbling technique) and serigraphy (placing paper on water to get a print), Ringsted works with India Ink pigments (made from soot and sap) to create intricate and beautiful snapshots of the ripple patterns on water, be it in a creek, tidepool, or ocean.
The ink is neutral to the environment and leaves no harmful chemicals, his art does not damage any area he places it down on. He uses only a few drops of ink, most of which is captured by the paper.
More process vidoes are available on his Instagram. He marks each piece with the geographic coordinates of the print.
Giving Fish a Second Life through Prints
Gyotaku is the Japanese art of making a print of a fish. It originated as a form of nature printing that was used by fishermen to record catches. It has since become an art form itself.
Gyotaku embodies the oldest form of taxidermy. Although it has been refined for a long time, it holds a wealth of data on marine life in Japan, allowing the cataloguing of its biodiversity.
On each print, the fishers wrote down the measurements of the catch, the name of the species, the place and date, and then signed it. Sometimes they added an ode to the sea to express their profound respect. The print of a body, in the detail of each of its scales, was an homage to the beauty of nature.
Source: Beside Magazine
There are several different ways that gyotaku or “fish rub” prints can be made, resulting in different levels of detail depending on whether or not you ink the fish directly or apply rice paper to the fish first and then ink. The ink is made from soot and vegetable oil to be entirely nontoxic.
Gyotaku (魚拓) — gyo for fish, taku, rub — is a practice that consists of making a print of a specimen on paper or fabric, by meticulously applying sumi ink to its scales. Beside Magazine
Gyotaku is an ode to delicacy, to precision, and to the philosophy of living in the moment.
In Canada, Alexis Aubin-Laperrière has spent years learning the art of gyotaku. One day he caught a particularly ugly mackrel but decided to try making a print of it.
For Alexis, each gyotaku is a window into the underwater world, but especially the improbable trace of an encounter between an artist and a fish, between the ephemeral and the indelible.
Through the art of gyotaku his relationship to fishing and to art has transformed. The act of printing the fish is the act of bringing it back to life, to be preserved forever on paper.
Foraging in Your Backyard for Inks and Pigments
This is where I got first introduced to making your own pigments: Jason Logan’s book Make Ink: A Forager’s Guide to Natural Inkmaking (2018).
His book is the perfect place to start: it features a recipe for trying out a pigment from anything you forage, instructions for specific colours he’s tried, and encouragement that it’s all about the fun of trying things out. No matter what happens with the colour in the moment or over time. Natural inks are living inks and will change over time.
Because Logan doesn’t use any toxic materials to set the inks, the pigments change over time. This slow evolution of shade and tone gives them a wonderful, living quality. Beside Magazine
Foraged dyestuffs can often result in surprising outcomes, I encountered this even recently when I made an ink from purple basil: it produced a desaturated greenish colour from bright purple leaves.
The external appearance of a plant is not always an indicator of the colour that it will produce. For instance, black walnuts impart a brown colour despite their name and lime-green husk, and the deep purple berries of buckthorn bestow a hazy light green.
Source: Beside Magazine
This is part of what makes natural ink and dyes so fun to experiment with. It’s fairly simple work in some ways: most of the recipes just involve boiling the ingredient with water, salt, and vinegar for several hours until it’s simmered down into a thicker concentration of pigment in the water. It’s something you can set up and leave relatively alone (although not entirely alone) and just check in on it every hour or so to see how it swatches! I am able to do it even in a tiny 400sq ft apartment. Just make sure you have an old pot that isn’t used for foodstuffs, a funnel, a coffee filter, and a jar to put the ink in (I use old spice jars haha).
I’d love to know: Would you try out any of these natural ink techniques? Have you done anything with natural inks before?
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After doing more research into gyotaku for this issue, I now really want to try that, although I’m not sure how feasible that one is in a small apartment. I am not a fisherman and I don’t particularly want to buy a fish from the grocery store just to do a print with.
I am now imagining finding a dead fish while beachcombing and bringing it back in a little container on the bus and having a good little chuckle. If you’re into more witchy activities like this, check out my personal substack, Strandline. In the latest issue, I wrote about my purple basil dye experiments.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing, Emma!
Super insightful, I love your posts!