 filming so I'll let you edit it and stuff. Buddy, welcome back to The Average and welcome to my kitchen. Today we are going to be trying or attempting any way to make ink and I hope that you guys will enjoy this video because I think it'll be quite fun. I don't know what I'm doing. I have learned everything that I use in this video from this book called Make Ink, A Forager's Guide. I can't say the word. It's an actual ink making by Jason Logan. I will link this down in the description if you're interested in trying this out for yourself. I'm going to be doing a few different recipes that I'm going to try myself because we went to the beach and I picked up a lot of shells for this interesting inking adventure. So for this project, you will need these items. I also forgot to mention that you will need the key ingredient, which is gum arabic. Now you can get gum arabic from any art store, I believe. You should be able to, I got mine on Amazon. They're only £6 a bottle, which is quite pricey but I think that we'll be using a little bit because they're going to be what binds our inks to the natural pigments together. Also, you will need some ink bottles. Now I'm using some old face wash ink syrupy type bottles, which I think will be perfect for inking ink. What I'm going to do is wash these first of all. I'm going to boil the glass in some boiling water just to make sure it's completely sterile and it doesn't interfere with any of our inks. So I'm going to do that now and then we'll get on with our ink making. So what did I pick up from the beach? Now I don't really have any idea what I'm doing because this is the first time that I've done this but I just picked up objects and colors that I thought would work really nicely for natural pigments. I'm not sure if they're going to work but in the book, Jason says to just have fun with foraging and picking up and experimenting with random things that you find and I think that's a really cool idea. I just picked up bits of sea glass that I thought would work. Bits of old tile that you often find at the beach. I try to create colors with this and I'm not sure if it's going to work but I'm going to use my pestle and mortar to just completely destroy these shells and try and get some natural colors from them. I've also picked up some seaweed that completely dried out now. I'm not sure how nice it will be but it might make like a nice like greeny brown. So let's see, we can only experiment. To just state for the record that obviously I am not an expert but I'm just trying out what the book told me and I'm just going to try and have fun with it and let's see what happens. So I've got a lot of blue tiles and blue shells here that I want to grind up. Let's just try this. Glass shards flying out at me. So that's great. Yeah, I would heavily suggest wearing a mask for this because as you can see, a lot of dust particles are flying up so you don't want to inhale any of that. It's kind of dangerous. So please be careful if you try this at home. So I think that's a smashed up as I'm going to get it. Just going to transfer this to a bowl so I can start mixing the next batch. I have to say, if you don't like nails on a chalkboard or any kind of sounds like that then you definitely won't enjoy grinding down bits of tile and things that you find on the beach. I came out with a bit of a gray type of pigment. There is a little bit of blue in there so I'm going to hope that this will become a really cool gray. It would be kind of nice to have ink off. Obviously it's not kind of the pigment that I thought it was going to be but then again, I don't know what I expected because probably most of the pigment, most of the items that I bought were mostly white with a bit of blue. So let's see, I think it looks kind of cool so let's see how it turns out. I'm going to put that to the side for now and start to grind up my next item. So the next one I want to do is kind of like this orangey brick shell red, browny color and I want to see what this turns out as which would be quite exciting. I think it is going to be like a little bit of a brown but I also got this like cute yellow shell. Probably we'll add just a little bit of yellow but not too much because it looks like it's a shell. When the shells are added it looks like it's just making it a bit more white. So I mean, let's see what it looks like. Remember to wear your mask. Also I would say wear some sunglasses. All protective goggles if you are doing this. So that took longer than I expected but with the magic of editing you guys will probably not even realize that. There must be some like clay in there and stuff. So I think this is looking really promising for like a brown pigment. It looks pretty rich and earthy so let's see. The next ingredient that I'm most excited about but least hopeful for is the sea glass green which I think is so beautiful. I really love when glass gets this kind of like edge to it where you know it's been in the sea for a long, long time and the rocks and the waves have just smashed it into this smooth glass. So I'm wearing my mask and eye protection so be careful when you do this if you do this. I'm not sure what pigment this will come out as. I'm pretty sure it'll be clear but it's worth a shot. Again, it's all about experimentation and just having fun with what you can forage for yourself. So let's see what this turns into. I'm just gonna grab my mask and we can get on with it. I think I'm gonna call it there because definitely do not try this at home. It is super dangerous. I know that I'm gonna get a lot of comments being like why did you do that? But I've been really careful as you guys can see I took it really, really slow and I don't wanna do anymore because I think it probably is too dangerous. It's looking nice though. It's looking the dangerous soup. So I'm just gonna be carefully decantering this into a glass and we'll see if it turns out to anything. Probably it won't even work because I don't see glass really having much pigment to it but let's see. I'm going to add the seaweed to this which I've dried and I'm just gonna crush down into whatever I can glass. Maybe it might add a bit of richness to it. So I'm just having fun and experimenting and I realized that was probably dumb but let's see how it turns out. Our third, fourth and final attempt is going to be these white shells that I picked up on the beach. Some of them have a bit of iridescent quality. Some of them have a bit too much gray. I'm gonna eliminate that one from the group because I think it might turn out to be too much like our gray slash blue one that I attempted to make. I'm not expecting too much from this. There is a recipe from the book that calls for limestone. So to make it feel white and that's the only one he knows. So let's see if this actually gives me any pigment. Not sure it will. So that's how fine I think I'm gonna get it. So I'm gonna add the pigment to a bowl. Then it says we have to add 650 millilitres of plain water to the bowl. Then we get our gum Arabic and we add two teaspoons of the gum Arabic which is our binder and the water is the vehicle. It's called, so put one, two. So that's roughly about two tablespoons of gum Arabic. That's all we need to do for now. I'm gonna do it with the rest of the pigments and I'll show you what the next steps are. So now what I'm doing is I'm adding my water, gum Arabic and pigment to hot. It says I need to add two tablespoons of white wine vinegar and tablespoon of salt and then bring to a boil just below boiling. So I guess that means simmering it for two hours. So I'm gonna put some pots on for the other three pigments and then I'll see you back in two hours by the power of editing. As expected, pretty much nothing on that one. Although it does have a little bit of like a greenish tinge. As expected, nothing really on that one either. And then the white shells, which is looking a little bit white, yellowy in this one and nothing for that one. So it looks like the only one that really worked was the clay kind of brick one, which it's kind of disappointing but we'll continue to go along with the method and see if anything changes. So for the clay one, which I'm gonna continue with, I've got my filter and then I've got like a coffee filter which will catch any smaller granules. And then I'm just gonna like try and sift through any color that I might have here. So as you can see, I'm filtering out all the colors now. This one is like getting stuck in the filter paper but you can see that it's got like a really nice color to it. The pigment is kind of coming through for this one. It's very yellow. I'm hoping that it develops a little bit of time. And then with the seaweed and the sea glass, it's looking super clear but the top bit is looking really gray which is kind of like a nice color for an ink. And then this one, the blue, it's looking super white which is weird. It's whiter than the actual white one. So first I'm gonna prep my bottles a little bit because it says to add some whole clothes to the bottle to help the ink last and not make it go moldy. So I'm just using these clothes. In the book, it does say that it's totally like a trial and error thing and you can come across different ingredients at some work and some don't. And clearly for this exercise, I think that the clay is the only one that's working. Probably a little bit of a fail this bag broke. So I can pretty much tell that the clay one is the only one that's really gonna work, I think. So I'm not sure if I wanna waste my gum Arabic on the rest. So that is my attempt at ink. The first one is this kind of brown. I'm gonna let it develop over time and I'm gonna go and get some more stuff to try and create different inks. Okay, that didn't go exactly as planned but now I'm gonna go for attempt number two and I'm gonna use the recipes from the book. So I'm going to try to make turmeric yellow, berry pink and a charcoal black. Now let's see how I work out or how this works out, trying to do something and following a recipe. First of all, I'm gonna do a simple recipe of turmeric and rubbing alcohol, which basically add together in a airtight container and you leave overnight. And then tomorrow morning, we will see how this ink does. It already looks pretty crazy. And then it should last forever due to the alcohol in ink. So easiest recipe by far. Should have started with this one. For this recipe, I'm going off track a little bit because it's supposed to be made with polka berries, which I do not have access to here. So I'm gonna be using dark grapes and some blueberries to see if I can make a similar effect with them. This should be kind of a similar thing. So I'm hoping that it works. If not, it was an experiment. So let's try this out. I hope that this one works because it will be a real shame to waste all these delicious looking grapes. So while that is cooking, I'm gonna attempt to make a black vine ink it's called. So you can get some links of grapevine and burn them and stuff, or you can just get some charcoal if you have any lying around your house. I need 24 grams of it, which I don't think I have. So I'm using less water. So basically you want to grind this up. Then you want to add it to a bowl. Slowly add the water in. Then you want three large teaspoons of gum Arabic. It looks like the grapes are pretty much done. So first we're going to try the black charcoal. Try the turmeric yellow. The turmeric yellow needs like overnight to like sink in but I'm gonna try it anyway. And then the pink, purpley, grape color, which I'm super excited about. Let's see how that goes. So I'm just gonna let them sit in there for a little bit to let the color develop because apparently once it dries as well, we will see what it really looks like. And that is the end of the video through a few ups and downs, one messy kitchen later. I have created about four inks that I'm sure I could probably use in the future. I'll do a quick like test of them now to show you how they develop overnight. And I hope that that shows how interesting and fun we can have with these textures. That's gonna play now. But I'd just like to say thank you to everybody for watching and please like and subscribe. And I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. Oh, and if you'd like to join my Patreon, I've got a few different Patreon rewards down below. So please check those out. Also, let's see how those inks did now. Bye. It's always shining hot as fire. But baby, I bet you're cool to love the rain. It's always shining right.