How to Make Ink with Plants - Recipe #3: Nettle
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 พ.ค. 2024
- Welcome to our third monthly seasonal natural ink challenge, this time using the ubiquitous stinging nettle. If you can’t find a nettle, try yarrow, spinach or goldenrod foliage instead. This recipe was courtesy of Bohemian Raspberry Art, who makes fantastic seasonal inks for sale. You can find her on Etsy and Instagram:
www.etsy.com/uk/shop/Bohemian...
/ bohemianraspberryart
Recipe and shortcuts:
00:00 Early Spring is the ideal time for making ink from nettles. While the leaves are fresh and young they give the best greens - older leaves tend to give muddier, brownish tones. The colours from nettles can vary a lot depending on the soil they grow in, so it’s worth experimenting with batches from different locations.
00:22 Cut just the top 6 or 8 leaves, and wear rubber gloves to avoid stings. Gather a good bunch of nettles - enough to half fill your ink making pot once chopped up.
00:55 With your gloves on, chop nettles into shreds and put into a small pot.
02:04 Pour over twice the volume of boiling water. Stir well and leave to steep overnight.
02:14 Bring the pot to a very gentle simmer - do not boil! Take off the heat immediately and leave to steep for a further 1 to 3 days. You’ll see the liquid colour gradually deepen from reddish-brown to dark green.
02:55 Strain the ink well to remove all the leaf matter, then return the liquid to a clean pan. Simmer gently, uncovered to reduce the liquid until you have a very concentrated solution. Use paper strips to test the colour every 10 to 15 minutes to see if it’s intense enough. Remove from the heat, cool and strain again to remove any stray bits of leaf.
04:03 For every 100ml of liquid, add 10-20ml gum Arabic solution and stir well. Decant into clean bottles. To deter mould, add 2 or 3 drops of essential oil, or a whole clove to each bottle.
05:55 Paint with your new ink!
If you would like to try out these inks but don't have time to make the recipe, consider checking out my Patreon, where you can receive a vial of previous months' botanical inks, plus see all the extended Daily Nature Journal content and paintalong videos. All patrons can also download printable pdfs of the month's recipe.
Patreon: / alexboon
You can also find me using the links below:
Instagram: / the_daily_nature_journal
/ alexboonart
Website: alexboonart.com/
My Etsy store: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/AlexBoonArt
Contact: thedailynaturejournal@gmail.com
Journal by Lotus Blu Book Art
Small journal by BohemianRaspberryArt.
Can’t wait to give this a try. Thanks for sharing
Hope you enjoy 😊
Thank you this has been a lovely project to do at home.
You’re welcome 😊
Thank you. Everything about this was a delight to watch.
Thank you ☺️
Looking forward to trying this.
I loved the mural hanging above your work area☺️
Thank you, that mural is a Jackie Morris concertina card, I love her work 😊
Just harvested some late summer nettle leaves here in northern New York State. I'll follow your advice/directions for making the ink. Very cool. Thank you!
You're welcome, hope your ink-making goes well! 😊
Well done. I'm going to try that, but have to wait till I get back to the UK. Right now I'm in a semi-arid part of BC Canada, and there aren't any nettles. :(
Cant imagine "no nettles" right now haha! You could practise using spinach, so you're ready to try in the UK. Apparently it works just as well, would be interesting to see what colour you can get from it 🤔
Fabulous. I have just bought some gum Arabic to have a go at this, having found the recipe via you on Instagram. It's good to see it being made 'in person'. I am really looking forward to having a go myself. I love nettles so any opportunity to build a deeper relationship with them is welcome.
Great to hear you're going to try this out. Would be great to see your results if you're up for sharing on Instagram 😊
@@AlexBoonArt I will do that. Thank you!
so beautiful🌿🌿i want to try this. This color makes me so calm.👌😌
Thank you, hope you manage to try it 😊
Thank you for this tutorial, straightforward and faff free. I use nettles for loads of things, but not ink…yet. Fortunately I live in the middle of a forest, so nettles are in plentiful supply. Beautiful mural as a backdrop too. It’s a subscribe from me 🌱
Thank you, glad it was useful for you! The mural in the backdrop is a Jackie Morris concertina card, I liked it so much I put it there above my desk 😊
wonderful, thanks! Do you ever make inks using dried plant material?
Thanks 😊 No, I have only ever used fresh material. I have no idea how well it would work with dried, but would imagine it would hae to be a quite strong pigment initially to survive drying out, it might work with some things 🤔
Thank you so much for making videos like this. As a nature lover when I hear botanical inks my ears perk up! LOL, I have a few questions. 1. How lightfast is this ink? 2. In your demonstration at the end, the ink seemed very transparent, even a bit washed out. Can you layer it like watercolor or gouache to get a darker color? I'm very interested to see your response. :)
Hi, it's lightfast enough for a sketchbook, but I wouldn't recommend using it for hanging work without some kind of UV protection. I expect even then it'll fade over time, but I kind of like that natural change. You can concentrate the pigment in three ways: 1. Boil more water off (after removing the leaves) when making the ink. Dip in test strips of paper to help decide when to stop the boiling phase. 2. Pour ink into a palette and let some water evaporate off before painting. You can even let it dry then reactivate it with some water. 3. Layer and layer on the paper. Hope that helps 😊
Beautiful video. Will the cloce alter the color over time? If not, why not?
Thank you :) As far as I understand it, the clove acts as a preservative/shelf-life extender. I haven't noticed it affecting the colour, and it seems to be used for this purpose quite widely. In any case, I would try to use the ink these within a year or so because of its organic nature.
Why 'just the tips' though? (Behave!)
I mean, in this case we are not eating them, and I'm guessing the green colour is chlorophyll based?
Its spring right now, I have some nettles in the garden, those bigger leaves at the bottom of the plants are otherwise useless...
Have people experimented and found them not so good for ink/dye? Poor colour? Less Colour?
Furthermore, what is this ink like in terms of light-fastness over time?
I'd love to know what people's experiences are.
(And I'm gonna experiment with them myself anyway!)
Lol! Well, from what I understand, it's because the plants accumulate iron from the soil with age. So an ink made from old leaves is more likely to darken, whereas if it is made from the leaf tips, it'll stay greener.
Pretty much any purely plant ink is not lightfast, but the extent of fade will depend on loads of things like the paper, degree of light exposure, etc. It's why I limit my plant inks to sketchbooks where light exposure will be minimal. Hope that helps 😊
@@AlexBoonArt Thank you for the response. I have already started experimenting... I was not so impressed with the colours I obtained from boiling the nettles, although I certainly didn't spend the time (yet) that you did to properly steep them, etc. But I noticed some brown and even red hues in the liquid. (which are in themselves pleasant, but not what I wanted.)
However, what I have already done, was to grab a bunch of nice looking leaves, and dry them in a dehydrator for a few hours. They become so crisp and brittle you can easily reduce them into a powder by simply crushing them. (Warning; even dry they can still sting you if you crush them with bare hands, don't ask me how I know! 😊)
This powder, with the addition of either alcohol (I used ethanol in my test) or distilled water, produced a very 'fresh' bright green colour. Obviously the final strength will depend on the concentration and how long you let it sit. The powdered leaves are also (I'm guessing) indefinitely storable in a sealed glass jar, until you actually need to make an ink or dye from them, which avoids the potential for moulding encountered in many liquid inks.
That's a good idea if you have a dehydrator, sounds like a great system. With the boiling and steeping you do need to keep going with that, but not to over-boil as you can burn the pigment that way. I think you have done more experimentation than I did already at this point, I would be very interested to see the colours that you come out with in the end.