Ink

:''Ink (or Inkwell) is also a handwriting recognition technology built into Apple Computer's Mac OS X since Mac OS X v10.2.'' An ink is a liquid containing various pigments and/or dyes used for colouring a surface to render an image or text. Common perceptions consider ink for use in drawing or writing with a pen or brush. However, inks are used most extensively in printing.
Types of ink
Early varieties of ink include Indian ink, various natural dyes made from metals, the husk or outer covering of nuts or seeds, and sea creatures like the squid (known as sepia). India ink is black and originated in Asia. Walnut ink and iron-gall nut ink were made and used by many of the early masters to obtain the golden brown ink used for drawing.
Pigmented inks
Pigmented inks contain other agents to ensure adhesion of the pigment to the surface and prevent its being removed by mechanical abrasion. These materials are typically referred to as resins (in solvent-based inks) or binding agents (in water-based inks). Pigmented inks have the advantage when printing on paper that the pigment stays on the surface of the paper. This is desirable, because when more ink stays on the surface of the paper, less ink needs to be used to create the same intensity of colour.
Dyes in inks
Dyes, however, are generally much stronger and can produce more colour of a given density per unit of mass. However, because dyes are dissolved in the liquid phase, they have a tendency to soak into paper, thus making the ink less efficient and also potentially allowing for the ink to bleed at the edges, producing unsightly and poor-quality printing. To circumvent this problem, dye-based inks are made with solvents that dry rapidly or are used with quick-drying methods of printing, such as blowing hot air on the fresh print. Other methods to resolve this include harder paper sizing and more specialized paper coatings. The latter is particularly suited to inks
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Indian Ink

fr:Encre de Chine Indian ink (or India ink in American English) is a simple black ink once widely used for writing and printing. Early treatises on the arts refer to black carbon ink that was prepared by the ancient Chinese and Egyptians. The basis of the ink was a black carbon pigment in an aqueous glue or binding medium. Sometime before the 12th century, Eraclius, in his De Coloribus et Artibus Romanorum, presented a set of directions for making several types of carbon inks, including one similar to the Indian ink of China, made from the soot of burning resin or wood. Different types of wood will create different-colored inks. In an English volume on handwriting of 1581, Theophilus presented a recipe for a carbon ink: :To make Inke in haste. :In hast, for a shift when ye have a great neede,
:Take woll, or wollen to stand you in steede,
:Which burnt in the fyre, the powder beate small:
:With vinegar, or water make Inke withall. As the recipe shows, no binder material is necessary: the carbon molecules are in colloidal suspension and form a waterproof layer after drying; often waterproof shellac is added though. nl:Oostindische inkt Category:Inks
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Walnut Ink

Walnut ink is an ink made from walnuts. A method for making it is give in this traditional recipe: In the fall as walnuts begin to drop, collect the largest walnuts in a five-gallon bucket. If the hulls are starting to rot and turn brown, it is all the better. Leave the bucket of walnuts in hulls under a shed cover for a week to ten days. If not already, the green hulls will begin to turn dark brown and soft. Find a large pot from the kitchen. Outside the house, place the completely rotten walnuts and hulls into the pot and cover with a generous amount of water. If you do not use a gas grill, a hot plate will work. The idea is to slow cook the brown hulls over the weekend at low heat, stirring every so often. If the water cooks down, add more. Eventually the walnut hulls will completely break down and brown ink will begin to form. Start testing the color strength with a stick and some white paper. It should be very dark brown, almost black when used straight, and a beautiful golden brown when thinned with water as a wash. Let cool and strain the entire mixture through nylon stocking to remove the nuts and heavy fiber. You can now heat again and boil down to the desired darkness and thickness. A very dark ink, just slightly thicker than water, is desired. Last, add an ounce or two of formaldehyde to keep the ink from rotting. Do not reheat or cook after adding formaldhyde because of the toxic fumes. The ink will be toxic because of the formaldehyde and should not be used by small children. A five-gallon bucket of walnuts should generate about a gallon of ink. Category:Inks
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Walnut Ink

These technique pages are very interesting! Where's the recipe coming from? There are recipe books from the middle ages and renaissance that could be mentioned. --MichaelTinkler This writing is my own, the recipe was passed on to me from a close artist friend. I learned it 20 years ago from a Baltimore painter, Earl Hofmann, who in turned learned it from his teacher Jacques Maroger. I have made walnut ink every year for over 20 years and have supplied many other artist and art stores with it. I have many recipes on various art materials and mediums which I currently use in my art work. You are right about the recipe books, I have quite a few in my collection. Most of the early works are very interesting and still work well today. The modern ones, in my opinion, are for the most part rubbish. The state of today's fine art painting materials and mediums is a topic for another article that I am drafting. The article on Maroger was my first draft. I will resubmit soon. I only wish that I could write better, I am trying to get a writer friend of mine to help with some edits. - Scott
Walnut Ink - Preservatives and Mordants
Hi, Folks! I have made walnut ink a number of times since the fifties, but having nothing other than the most general of recipes to go on, handed down through my family, I have had to resort to trial and error. In the course of this process, though, I have found a couple of modifications that seem to work well for me. I use a glass crock that holds about three gallons. This I fill halfway with walnuts from the ground, hulls of course still on, and add water to cover the contents plus half again the amount added. If I have selected the walnuts properly, that is, all have turned brown, I don't have to wait so long. Using a masher such as a baseball bat, I carefully pulverize the contents and let the batch sit 24 hours. Being stingy, I save the screened pulp, cover it again with water, and leach out every bit of ink I
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Invisible Ink

Invisible ink is a substance which can be used to write with, which is either invisible on application or disappears quickly, and can be subsequently restored by some means. The use of invisible ink is a form of steganography, and has been used in espionage. The simplest forms of invisible ink are lemon juice and milk. For this type of 'heat fixed' ink, any acidic fluid will work. Write on paper with a fountain pen, toothpick or a finger dipped in the liquid. Once dry, the paper appears blank. The writing is made to appear by heating the paper, on a radiator, iron or oven for example, though a 100W light bulb is less likely to damage the paper. Other types of invisible ink use different chemical reactions, usually an acid-base reaction (like litmus paper) similar to the blueprint process. These dual chemical ink/decoder pairs use a spray bottle for the decoding liquid or vapor (e.g. for ammonia fumes to decode phenolphthalein ink), or an invisible ink pen with two tips, one the encoding tip, and one the decoding. A cover message should be written over the invisible message, since a blank sheet of paper arouses suspicion. Invisible ink is sometimes used to print parts of pictures or text in books for children to play with, particularly while they are travelling. A decoder pen is included with these books so that the children may rub the decoding pen over the invisible part of the text or picture, revealing the answer to a question printed in regular ink, the missing part of a picture, or the like. Very rarely, invisible ink has been used in art. It is usually decoded, though when it is not, it makes a mockery of the concept of "visual art".
List of invisible inks
Revealed by heat
# Some of these are organic substances that oxidize when heated, which usually turns them brown. Milk
# Lemon juice
# Onion juice
# Apple juice
# Sugar solution
# Diluted honey
# Diluted cola drink
# Vinegar
# Urine
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