Friday, February 25, 2011

Nature Dyes

I'm loving this! It reminds me of leaf spots in Autumn.
It's the result of indian ink being dripped onto wet paper to cause a reaction, the paper was dried and then over-dyed with a wash of walnut dye. The pic below shows my son making one of his indian ink/water papers which we did  a few weeks ago. I saw the potential for good collage fodder so made myself a few too!  He graciously donated me his papers as well:)


My walnut dye. It's pretty dark so I was surprised it gave such an rust/orange shade to my paper. I made it by mixing and matching recipes I found on the net but the basic brew went like this...

Soak green walnuts in water in a stainless steel bowl 
(Until they ferment/smell bad and your family threaten to throw it out if you don't do something with it!! lol)
Boil the brew 20mins and then add 1 part white vinegar to help prevent mold.

So far this method worked but I think I should have boiled them longer to get the darker shade of brown I thought I was making! The dye is now in a jar out of direct sunlight, I will be interested to see if ageing it makes any difference to the dye colour. No doubt I could water it down to get a lighter shade of rust if I wanted too.

These too pics are the resulting papers from my Eucalyptus dye experiments. I like the shade of brown I got with  these.I added my own designs to the paper as you can see! Most of the "line" paper has already been used in my collage work so I will have to get another brew boiling! Good thing I collected a lot of bark!


ICE #12 is nearly finished. It was inspired by a game of snakes and ladders and uses a large piece of my lined eucalyptus paper so watch this space!

10 comments:

Irene said...

Interesting experiment with the ink and the dye, I like the result.

ArtPropelled said...

Interesting to read about your natural dyes. I've been meaning to play with walnut ink and see what effects I can get.

nancy neva gagliano said...

thanks for sharing those recipes! lovely tones!

Mick said...

Nice! ... and you've given me an idea. I may boil my erosion bundle come the end of April before pulping it to make a piece of paper. Hm-m-m-m.

notmassproduced said...

nice inky goodeness..i used to dye my hair with walnuts!

Lisa said...

very nice...i use the walnut powder and mix it up with water..then you can get a very dark color. I also put my wet stained papers in the oven in a glass pan on low... for more interest...just be careful!

Anonymous said...

these are gorgeous, lady! love them! we have a big huge walnut tree out back, probably about 100 years old, and i have been itching to make walnut ink, dye and stain. i think i mentioned before that we'll be whipping up a batch to stain our new fence with. i can't wait!! except i'm allergic to walnut. ha. go figure.

i may soon post some of my herb and berry dyes i've been making. i should send them to you first!

xxxo
a

Jill Zaheer said...

Great post with easy to follow techniques for these dyes and paper treatments. Thanks so much for sharing them- super results!

John M. Mora said...

the bottom image is gorgeous, I feel the soft impressions of gravity....my best.

amiria said...

Hi Lisa,

I have just featured your ink splatters in a blog I write to help high school art students: amiria [blog]

I have credited the image to you (of course) and included a link back to your site.

Please let me know if you are not happy for me to you use your work as an example, and I will remove it immediately.

Thank you! :)

Amiria