"They spawn as it were in March and Aprill; the Geese are formed in May and June, and come to fulnesse of feathers in the moneth after."
Cennino Cennini
The Craftsman's Handbook
Welcome back! For those who don’t follow me on social media, I have recently begun creating again after a several-month hiatus (for various reasons covered there) and one of the things I also wanted to do was resurrect my blog to use as a continued record of work and inspiration, especially as I am gearing up for some more ambitious projects that would benefit from having some written components to pair with them.
For my first post in a few years, I thought I’d re-visit a topic I first wrote about in 2019 with my post on Iron Gall Ink – traditional materials and their creation. This is particularly timely as in a few days I will again be learning from Thomas Little about pigment creation – this time in New Hampshire on the topic of iron based pigments at Long Ridge Farm, I am incredibly excited for this two day workshop and can’t wait to expand my knowledge on hand made materials.
This time I’m approaching materials from a medieval standpoint, and iron gall ink was in fact used in many manuscripts, along with another ink known as Brazilwood Ink or “Brasil” ink. Brazil/Brasil/Brasill was the name given to a number of trees found throughout the world that produced a compound known as brazilin and were used to produce this valuable red pigment that was used in rubrication (from the latin “rubricare” – to color red), the process by which certain words were marked in red within a script to make them stand out. It was also used as a dye for clothing as well. This article from Medium does a great job of breaking down the areas the trees were found, the etymological history of the word “brazil”, and also covers a story of Marco Polo attempting to plant one of the brazilin-producing trees in Venice, with no success.
Image of the calendar page for November from MS q Med. 88 Book of Hours from the 1400’s from the Boston Public Library. The letters in red were most likely done with Brazilwood Ink.
For brazilin-based recipes, there are several historical options available. The intro quote to this post is from artist Cennino Cennini’s The Craftsman’s Handbook* which is available online via the Internet Archive. The quote actually refers to a method of preparing brazil for inclusion in ultramarine pigments, but it was too funny not to include and the preparation of the brazilwood is similar across most recipes – mainly that it is shredded and combined with alum (specifically, aluminum potassium sulfate).
Screenshot from the Internet Archive scan of A Booke of Secretes, showing the recipe I ended up following.
The recipe I ended up using was actually from A Booke of Secretes** (also on the Internet Archive). I picked this one because it was the most simple/straightforward and there was a great class run by the SCA at one point that included excellent documentation by HL Ian the Green (who also has a video you can follow along with).
So, I gathered my materials and followed the recipe, as outlined below.
Recipe 2: to seeth Brasill another way (from A Booke of Secretes)
1/3 quart beer, wine, or vinegar (I used vinegar)
1 ounce Brazilwood
3 grams Alum (aluminum potassium sulfate)†
3 grams gum arabic†
“To an ounce of Brazil, take the third part of a quart of beer, wine, or vinegar, put it in a new pot. Let it stand a night, in the morning let it on the fire, and let it seethe till it be half consumed, then for every ounce of Brazil, take two penny worth of alum, beaten to powder, and as much beaten gum arabic, stir them well together, and let them seethe again, but if you desire to have it somewhat dark, then scrape a little chalk into it: when is seethes, let it not seethe over the pot, and being cold, strain it through a cloth, and put it into a glass well stopped.”
Following the steps as faithfully as I could I ended up with my initial pass at Brazilwood ink. As you can see, it’s quite dark. At this point I assumed there was some residue in the pot from the last ink that had been made in it, a batch of Iron Gall Ink, that impacted the PH in some way. Interestingly, the ink painted on quite bright and darkens on the page (much like the iron gall ink).
The first attempt…the swatches all dried a very dark purple. Beautiful, but not the desired result…
The color was a gorgeous deep royal purple. As stunning as it was, however, it wasn’t as red as the examples I’d seen. Resigning myself to a pretty failure, I put the ink aside and continued on to researching other pigments in the meantime. It was in this research that I found a tidbit of information on how to correct the color on the Kremer Pigmente website.
“Lehner recommends boiling the ink again if the color deviates and adding tartar (#64170) until the desired red hue is achieved.”
After some digging into “Lehner” I found a book titled The Manufacture of Ink‡ by Sigmund Lehner, that appears to have been originally published in German in 1889.
It does mention on page 129 of the English translation:
“The ink thus prepared frequently shows a violet tinge, which is remedied by gradually adding to the boiling ink small portions of finely-pulverized tartaric acid until the desired color appears.”‡
So, I re-boiled the ink and added in an additional 3 grams of alum, not having any tartaric acid on hand, and the new results are on the right below – with the original swatches on the left. Of note is the fact that the new tests sat for 24 hours to make sure it wouldn’t dry darker.
Finally! An ink that is much more red than purple! The final result is quite interesting. The ink is translucent and darkens significantly as it dries. You can get some really interesting textures and shades if you water it down a bit and layer it like watercolor.
An illustration of a datura stramonium pod, using brazil wood ink.
Overall I’m fairly pleased with the results. I would like to try adding tartaric acid at some point to see if that impacts the color even more, but otherwise I consider this a success. The ink I’m left with flows fairly easily, dries dramatically darker, and layers for interesting effects. Because it was made with boiled vinegar it does smell quite strongly of vinegar, but it’s not too bad.
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