Making Ig Ink From Pure Chemicals.

[DavidCampen]

I am considering making some IG ink using pure chemicals - gallic acid, ferrous sulfate etc. I am not interested in extracting tannins from tea, or galls or bark etc. nor am I interested in making my own ferrous sulfate. I would just buy what I need. Do we have any formulas here that show the preparation of an IG ink using pure chemicals?

[Tweel]

There have been some threads on old government-approved recipes for iron gall blue-black inks, such as this one. Also, try digging through the threads that come up via a search for "Pharmacist Urkundentinte". I seem to remember that early on, Pharmacist pointed to a standard German recipe. Both also come up in the last section of the Wikipedia article "Iron gall ink".

[dcwaites]

Tweel has beaten me to it.

 

When you get to the blue dye, you can use any dye colour you like. The ink as made is a thin straw colour until it dries, oxidises and turns black. This means that it is very hard to see what you have written until it starts to dry. The dye is added so you can see what you are writing, and blue is added for traditional reasons. But, you can use red, green, even black if you don't want to see the colour change. The choice is yours.

 

This is the approach that KWZ uses with his iron-gall inks - https://vanness1938.com/collections/kwz-iron-gall-inks