Inks for Calligraphy and Painting
Here are some medieval Persian ink recipes from Qadi Ahmad’s Calligraphers and Painters:
Take equal weights of soot and alum, a double weight of gallnuts
A threefold weight of gum and then (use) the strength of your arm.
[There follows a description of how to collect soot and remove oiliness from it and a very complex recipe which I am omitting for brevity.]
Another recipe: Put some wheat starch into a copper pot and bake it on a slow fire until it becomes black, but see that it does not burn. Then triturate it. Put some gallnuts into water until they soften. Distill them, pour into the starch and gradually mix them, and put on the fire to boil. Then strain it, adding to it some alum, and use it.
[Yet another recipe:] Put some lampblack into a mortar and pound it until it becomes very shiny. Then distill some gum Arabic, which should be neither thick nor thin, and pour it little by little into the mortar, rubbing it carefully until it grows strong. Then mix a little sugar or candy and salt with rose water and mix it. On the next morning rub the whole and close careful in a bottle. Then use it when necessary.
So we see a combination gall and lampblack ink with gum Arabic as the primary additive and rosewater, alum and sugar being secondary additives. Oak galls are scabs formed in the bark of an Oak tree in reaction to an insect bite. Either find an oak tree with lots of little lumps on it, or purchase galls from a pigment or dye seller. The main thing that makes the gall work for ink is the tanic acid that is concentrated in these "tree scabs." Sugar or honey will help the ink to be flexible (and not crack or flake off the page once dry.) It is important to note that gall ink is a reactive ink and dyes into the paper whereas lampblack inks are more like paints, sitting on the surface of the paper.
A recipe for Oak Gall ink: (memo to me, get a more exact recipe)
- Take your Oak Galls and grind them into a powder (it doesn't have to be particularly fine, you can in fact leave the galls as large chunks, but a finer powder will make ink faster.)
- Add the galls to a pot of water and set it to simmer for (time?).
- Add iron (or just make it in an iron pot!) Watch the reaction as you add the iron, the liquid will turn instantly darker.
- Continue to cook for a while, add some gum arabic (quantity?)
- Strain off the ink
Don't forget to size and burnish your paper before doing calligraphy!