need help with making ink sticks

[Nick Strait]

okay i have a really odd project, i mentioned in the intro section that im a artist trying to make Nara sumi stick ink, its a extremely traditional ink thats in a solid form thats ground down and thinned with water that has been more or less considered the best ink in the world for several hundred years, also its exact way of making has been kept a secret that long... the problem is its almost impossible to obtain outside japan and also there only 2 companies i know of that still make it that are still in business.. sooo im going to give you all the information i can possibly think of ans see if you have any idea for making it..
ill start with showing you a bleed of some of the inks

the top left is a mid grade buku undo stick, it has two separate bleeds one light and one dark, but whats weird is they dont touch, something about them keeps the ink from bleeding together in the middle and blending, but what makes it midgrade is the edge of the dark bleed is darker so it makes adding new layers kinda weird(but still great .
the middle left is the highest grade boku undo ink stick i have, it has a slightly colder hiue to it and doesnt have the ridge of darker along the bleeds
the top right is Parker Quink(fountain pen ink), its pretty interesting since its black ink and bleeds out orange and blue with a fractal type of look.
middle left is PH Martins Black Star Hi Carb ink, similar to the quink but super even uniform bleeds
the bottom left is golden panda ink from china, its really low quality so much that its actually pretty good
and the bottom right is shanghai premium 101 stick ink from china which is about the highest grade ink you can get in china but if you look at it and the golden panda they meet in the middle and make a flat grey center. and the 101 ink sticks have nice pigment but the sticks just fall apart(i guess they weren't pressed properly idk)
here another pic of dried boku undo sumi ink washes and just straight up unwashed lines

its really hard to describe how these inks are the best, they have a mind of there own and they never bleed how youd expect them too but always look awesome.
other odd things about them is there water soluble in stick form and dry on the surface waterproof, also there the only ink ive ever used on cloth that stick like dye, they fade a huge amount while there drying but once its dry it never fades again(there 700 year old paintings with this ink that look brand new)also kinda random but the better ones are scented with either rose or something similar(seen camphor, menthol(scents that are sold in crystal form)

ive found these videos with details on the making of them

(skip to 1:30)

(skip to :35)

(skip to 1:30 again)

(pretty obnoxious but maybe useful)

and these two websites with s gallery somwhat detailing it
http://www.boku-undo.co.jp/HP/eng/eprodu.html extremely outdated webpage
http://kobaien.jp/koutei (fairly up to date page for the oldest ink shop in nara)

thats really about everything i have on them, ill be sending a piece of one to Doug once i figure out how to cut off a piece without shattering the stick (slightly overprotective of them >_< it took me 3 months and several translators to get the ones i have)there kinda like air dried clay that way, but if you can figure out how to make them it would be amazing(or if you could figure out how to make part of the process faster or better),also if its beyond my current tools to make myself id totally buy a few hundred teal off you. i really dont want this art to be lost, but it seems really on the brink too..

[Jerry]

Really? I have seen sumi ink and stones at several places.

[Nick Strait]

there likely fake, if the stick doesnt come in a wooden box(used to keep the moisture from leaving the stick too quickly) or have a 101 engraved onto it(chinas government makes any real ink sticks have a grade stamp on them) it very likely fake,also if it doesnt have a scent its likely not even alittle usable(most are made of burned tires and plaster) ive tried 5 or 6 sticks in America and there insanely bad.

[Doug Coulter]

I'd be able to help more if I knew the conditions for making those "paper chromatographs" above, for starters. Both my mass spectrometers are currently down for repair, though Jerry has one up right now I think, and so does JohnF, but now we're talking opposite sides of the planet. I have a sentimental interest in this one myself. My Mom was quite an artist in this medium, and once drew a pretty impressive pic for me, inside a young kid's attention span. One tap, done just so with everyhing (ink, brush, slight twist of wrist) is a new bamboo leaf. I thought I had a scan of it, but can't find it just now. If I can find the piece again, I'll get it posted here. I suspect we might have a mix of charcoal and some iron compounds here, but that's just a guess, with some binder (fish glue?/PVA), again, just a guess. Those would be compatible with what I think I see above, anyway, and were around in other inks at the time. The thing is, if they used charcoal - there are a zillion different kinds with very different properties; ask anyone who has made black gunpowder about that one - the pyrotechics field is full of treatises on what the various types of charcoal are good for there. Willow charcoal is VERY different from say, Pine or Oak, and all vary with the tree and the conditions under which they got charred. This is WAY not-trivial to reverse engineer.

Nick, to make the youtubes embed, the trick is to strip off all except the part after v=. The board knows about the rest and adds it back so the rest is redundant and can't find the channel.

Eg, this:

Code: Select all

[youtube]K91Q2dJSxS8[/youtube]

Gets you this on your first one.



(goes and looks for his own example of this art - it's worth doing) - and here it is, though it wouldn't all fit on my scanner. This took under 5 min for a talented artist, I was stunned watching it come to life. The sig, FC, is because her name was Winifred - so we called her "freddie". Click on the pix here to get a full size view of it - that's how picutres uploaded here (vs linked from elsewhere) work. I like them here - that way they get backed up, and if someone forgets and deletes something off a FLKR account it doesn't break the board (hint). Remember, not everyone has a super-fast connection. That's why the board normally shows a reduced version, and then gives you the option to expand what interests you.

My introduction to this form.

[Nick Strait]

*googles "chromatograph"* ah okay you mean the bleeds, i just filled in a square of the page with water and then put the ink on the top and bottom edge of the water for it to bleed across.

also i forgot to mention, as far as i know there only 3 ingredients,
carbon- from either pine or rapeseed oil (i know ive seen others, basically a oil or wood that burns for a good deep black carbon) , some of the photos ive linked show a kind of lamp used for collecting the carbon from the oil. i think in one of the videos it mention getting pine carbon from germany(maybe the denser grain makes it better in some way(like with violin wood(no idea)?
animal glue(maybe horse) - i know that Boku Undo uses a new non animal based glue but has a very similar property to it, maybe some form of non waterproof wood glue? when ive seen it in its most basic form its kinda like a beige ambery crystal type of material.
and the 3rd ingrediant is some kind of scented powder or crystal- i dont think its entirely needed for the ink, the lesser inks ive used dont have the scent, smells kinda like rotting wood(or in worse cases very old socks or dead fish(or a combination...), the scented ones smell like rose? ive seen some that used camphor and other traditional Chinese medicines in a crystal form(think ive seen menthol also)

ah okay ill go edit the youtube links

btw that art is pretty awesome, good contrast and some really nice lines, its even in a bit classic Asian atmospheric perspective. i think thats the second time ever ive run into a sumi painting with a very asian style but a very American subject, its neat, kinda like that Coke cola can someone made with Chinese porcelain.

[Doug Coulter]

You can do a more-informative paper chromatograph by (depending on how the ink works) either just letting a very wet ink line (from a brush) spread out on something it spreads well on (filter paper, paper towel), or by drawing an ink line, and while it's still wet, add water just behind it, so the water, as it spreads through the (wet) ink, carries it past the ink line. The idea is that the medium (paper of some sort) lets some molecules travel faster or further, while the paper captures and stops some other ones - kind of a sorting process based on how well the paper grabs various components or how well water moves them (water is sticky stuff, a polar molecule, itself). If you try this with other things - we had to do it with "magic markers" in high school, it tends to separate the components so you can at least study them visually, or cut them off the paper separately and analyse them that way. It can make things a lot simpler to understand.

There is a vast difference between carbon black (and smaller differences depending on what burned under what conditions - eg what impurities it picks up in the burn process), and charcoal, which has a lot more non-carbon content and which varies widely even between trees of the same sort, much less different varieties. Soot tends to be linear chains of carbon atoms, or blobs or little buckyballs. Charcoal tends to be graphite doped with "whatever inorganics were in the tree and some of the heavier tars" - like I said vastly different, though they look alike to the untrained eye, at least until you try to use them for ink!

I'd say so far - and I've not yet had time to look at all you've posted (my-bad), I'm still busy deflecting offers and answering emails from joiners - that we really have about 2 main questions. Are we carbon black or charcoal, and what's the binder.
And it depends on what you're really looking for here - "authenticity" or "work-alike" how important some of the details are. For example, pure PVA of the right molecular weight might be a fine binder for "work-alike" but is almost surely not what was in the original, since they didn't have that to work with then in pure form (it is in some animal glues, but there is a large difference between animal hide glues and fish glues - which is just about my entire expertise in that field - I use titebond II in practical wordwork, and it's pretty not-water-soluble once dried). Elmer's white glue appears to be a mix of PVA and fish glue.

Scenting was done deliberately quite a lot back in the day, in the west too (And still is in china paint for porcelain or other fired work, as well as in sealing wax (basically shellac) but that is a nicety for the artist, not something functional, usually. Kind of a matter of taste there. If they used enough, there could be some actual effect from somewhat-polar (eg water soluble) complex organics, but it's usually not enough to make much difference in how things work, and in old supplies, anything you could have smelled has usually already evaporated - if it wasn't "coming off" you couldn't smell anything. Dunno if this stuff has a "use by" date, or not.

Yeah, my Mom did interesting work, she later got into watercolours, which I inherited. Turns out they are pretty popular, I sold a few for silly (big) prices. Just a South Dakota girl, 1/16th Cherokee, the rest a mix of Celt. I never picked up her talents in this, just had a deep respect for them. The yellow/brown of that rice paper is that it was on the wall, unframed, for about 40 years above the desk of a then chain smoker...(me). Adds character I suppose.

[Nick Strait]

ah okay ive put down some new bleeds, and ill post the pics once its dry.

the photos ive found on which kind of carbon seem usually to be of basically a oil lamp with a bowl over the flame to collects the carbon, i havent actually found any photos of how they get pine carbon outside one video mentioning getting it from germany, havent looked to much into that...
infact might be able to read one of the bags from the video... *goes to check*... O_O yes you can thew bag reads
S 160 Degussa with what might be 1 in a diamond shape?
and number printed on the side reading 000129 (this is like 4chan detective work)
oh and i just found this likely completely unhelpful old image of soot being collected from a furnace

in the authentic or work alike thing it doesnt really matter, im not too sure there can even be a difference for something like this anyway,id imagine with 500+ years of practice they would have taken any easier or better way of making them by now..then again could be wrong,but if its anything like any other asian style art i can confirm that all the most pointless details tend to actually be important(nearly broke my ankles a few times trying to build old Geta shoes for a costume i made) as long as it works the same and doesn't crumble into pieces im okay.

i dont think ink sticks have a expiration date.. ive seen 3 4 hundred+ year old sticks, but after about 80 years they become collectables and no one i know of grinds them down. cant imagine why they wouldnt work still, but i dont really plan to find out(especially since the really old ones are pretty beautiful)


id like to see some of your watercolors, watercolor is actually my favorite color medium, its a unique mix of complete control and no control whatsoever(kinda like trusting UPS to not fold your envelopes if that makes sense). i use M. graham watercolor tubes, that or i mix a few drops of pure honey into whatever watercolor tubes i can find(it keeps the paint from drying out too much in the pans).
yeah the smoke makes it looks like a authentic old silk painting

[Nick Strait]

just ran into this, by far the most modern looking video on ink making

[Nick Strait]

okay just tried that out, put down water then ink on the top and bottom then added water behind it.. helpful or not its a beautiful bleed.

[Nick Strait]

ive posted pretty much everything i as a english speaker can possibly find on the subject. hope its useful, if it beyond the capabilities to come up with more or less a recipe and materials/tools list here let me know(or if you know someplace that might be more likely to be able to make them feel free to link me) im still digging around its just crazy obscure, ive also requested a few places that specialize in carrying rare art supplies about getting them(so far nothing.. some of these traditional ollld companies are pretty weird about who they sell too) really feels sometimes like im trying to get alien technology, the amount of fakes, low quality rip offs, decorative fakes, and antique unusuable, mixxed with liquid sumi inks and solid printer inks outnumbers the real stuff a crazy amount, makes finding anything pretty brutal