I wanted to find out what the difference in color and consistency would be with a batch of English walnut hulls. I gathered fresh hulls from a dozen nuts and simmer them in four cups of distilled water. Before I had used just tap water, and it worked fine, but I've read that you can get more consistent results with distilled water. I've tried a few things with tap water than I'll talk about in another post.
So after simmering the hulls for 4 hours and reducing the liquid to half, I removed the hulls and continued to simmer and reduce it to one cup. Its much thinner than the black walnut ink, but its a beautiful, much lighter color. I think this would be better suited to a watercolor wash than dipping ink.
For now I'm going to concentrate on just black and butternut. I have found no real benefit to separating the two from each other, but combining them makes for a unique and rich ink.
This is another comparison test.
Batch #1 is the lightest but #2 was very nice. I called it Sienna just to give it a name other than #2. I called #3 Mahogany and its my favorite. Its got a very rich, almost sludgy consistency that lends itself well to dipping pens. #4 is a store-bought spray I purchased to compare mine to. Its very thin, but of course it would need to be to work in a spray bottle.
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