Hi everyone, welcome back to Curious by Nature.
I'm Nicole and today we're going to learn about making natural inks with artist Salim Moore.
Let's see what Salim has for us.
Hello everybody, my name is Salim Moore and today we're going to be making ink.
I am an artist here in Chicago, Illinois.
I make paintings and drawings, and I studied at the School of the Art Institute,
and this is something I learned from Richard Deutsch
and all the cool folks in the Studio Lab at SAIC.
So right here, I have a bunch of ingredients
that I found all around the city of Chicago.
I have some walnuts, English walnuts, and these produce a beautiful brown.
I don't even have to climb the trees to get these,
I just wait until they fall on the ground.
and then in this jar right here, I've got some acorns.
These are acorn caps and they produce a wonderful silvery gray if you make ink from them.
And I also have some alder cones from the alder tree that grows right across the street from my house,
and these produce a nice warm brown.
And last but not least we have some oak galls,
and these are produced when a wasp lays its egg in an oak tree.
The oak produces this defensive growth that eventually houses the wasp's egg.
If you look closely, you can see the little holes where the baby wasp climbed out,
and in medieval times people would grind these up and produce iron gall ink
which they would make with rain water and iron,
and that ink can be a dark black or even a beautiful brown.
Over here, I have some of the inks I made myself.
In this bottle, I have walnut ink,
I have inks that I made from mulberry trees, which are growing right now.
I have ink that I made from the alder tree,
I have pokeberry ink right here, and I even have sumac ink.
And these are all from plants that are native here in Chicago and Illinois.
For today's exercise, we're going to make some ink from blackberries.
This is a really simple ink, and it's really beautiful, and it's one of my favorites.
I learned this from my teacher Richard Deutsch,
and we call it Roman black, because it's believed to be an ink
that the Romans used from people in the Middle Ages,
or rather, people in the Middle Ages believed that the Romans used this
to get a black and that's how this recipe comes to us.
The ingredients we're gonna need to make this ink are some measuring spoons,
we're gonna need some cheesecloth
--which we're gonna squeeze the blackberries through with our hands
and our hands are going to get blackberry juice all over them--
and then we're going to use some salt, which is going to help preserve the ink,
and we're going to use some vinegar which is going to help preserve the color of the ink,
and last but not least, the main ingredient, blackberries.
And so I have about one cup of blackberries in here.
There's actually a blackberry bush in the community garden in my neighborhood
in Logan Square, but it's only produced five blackberries that I've seen and I ate all of those,
so I got these blackberries from the grocery store.
And then the cheesecloth I also found in the grocery store,
but I actually had to bike pretty far to get that because my local grocery store doesn't carry cheesecloth.
So, in a pinch, you can use a coffee filter or even a number of paper towels that are bunched up.
It just needs to be thin enough so that the juice comes out, but it catches the seeds.
The first step, I'm going to take my bowl of blackberries,
I have about one cup of blackberries here,
and I'm just gonna pour them in to my cheesecloth.
And then I'm gonna very carefully bring up all four corners of the cheesecloth,
and I want to pick my cheesecloth up and I'm going to kind of pinch it
so that none of the blackberries escape.
You see they're trapped in there like a net.
And then the next step is, I'm going to squeeze these blackberries with my fingers
and this bowl right here is going to collect all the juice.
Alright, so I've got a firm grip on my cheesecloth holding the blackberries,
and then the next step I'm just going to take both of my hands
and I'm going to crush them and you can see that
all that juice is going to come out, but the cheesecloth is
working like a net to capture the seeds of the blackberries,
so only the blackberry juice is coming.
And I think this part is really fun.
See how I'm squeezing it with both hands?
While the blackberries are getting smaller there's still a lot more squeezes in there.
It's okay if some seeds escape and get in there,
you can pick them out of your ink later or wait until your drawing dries.
So I went and I washed my hands really quickly, and this is going to make the next steps really easy.
So once we've cleaned our hands,
we're gonna use our next two ingredients, which are gonna be the salt and vinegar,
and for that I'm gonna use my measuring spoon.
So I have the big one, which is one tablespoon, and I'm going to take one tablespoon of salt
and add it to the blackberry juice.
So see right now I'm going to pour the salt into my tablespoon,
and I'm just gonna dump it into there.
And then, second, I'm gonna take one tablespoon of vinegar,
and I always do it in this order because that way
the salt won't get stuck to the vinegar inside of the tablespoon.
So I'm going to gently pour the vinegar into the tablespoon,
and it's okay that a few drops got in there it's not an exact science,
and then I'm going to pour the vinegar into the blackberry juice.
Lastly, I'm just going to take my spoon and I'm going to give it a few mixes,
for maybe about 15 seconds,
just so all that vinegar and salt mixes into the blackberry juice.
And once I'm done mixing it, we'll go ahead and test our ink and see how it looks.
So now comes the fun part where we're going to make art, and as you can see,
I brought some brushes with me today, all different kinds of sizes of brushes.
I have a big flat brush, I have a tiny little pointy brush,
and then I have some medium-sized brushes with black handles.
It doesn't matter what brush you use, any of them will work.
Start by one of the first things I learned to write, which was my name,
and you can see that because this is an organic ink,
that we just filtered through the cheesecloth,
it's got a lot of different particulate in it.
But look at that beautiful blue and red color.
It's got pinks and blues, and even some dark speckles in it, and it's really nice.
So, earlier, I showed you some of the inks that I brought myself
and so I prepared a little swatch for you guys of the walnut, the blackberry ink we just made,
the mulberry ink, the poisonous pokeberry ink, the alder, and the sumac.
I got all of these inks from natural materials that I found here in the city of Chicago
and you guys can do the exact same thing and you'll get a world of colors.
So keep experimenting and see what you can find.
Thanks, Salim, that's our show for today.
Thank you so much for joining us.
We hope you enjoyed learning about making inks using common natural objects.
Be sure to leave any questions in the comments below, and subscribe so you'll never miss an episode.
You can also find links to Salim's work below.
We'll see you back here next time on Curious by Nature.