Gum Arabic Proportions, Units, Etc

[Corona688]

I'm looking for a ballpark figure here: How much gum arabic powder to how much pigment powder to how much water to start from, to make a flowing pen ink. Measure in any units you want, from hogsheads to micrograms to millileters, as long as it's not ounces. :wall:

 

Ounces is one of those units which can inspire murder. Ink recipes tend to be ancient and obscure, and mention ounces without explaining whether they're liquid ounces, liquid weight, dry volume, or dry weight. Sometimes 'degrees baume' is also involved, which is when I get to start looking up the molecular weights of gum arabic, whee.

[white_lotus]

Gum arabic and pigment are recipes for watercolor snd gouache paints. Fountain pen inks are made from dyes.

[Corona688]

If you don't know the answer, that's okay.

 

Last I checked, these forums also included dip pens. I'm also not the first to note that practically all homemade ink recipes, fountain pen or other, involve gum arabic.

 

I really doubt that "proper inks" are purely dye and water, anyway. They require the correct consistency to work, and dyes are poor at ... anything besides being colorful. If you have any knowledge what they use, that would be useful too.

Edited January 7, 2018 by Corona688

[FrMark]

Actually, I logged on to report on my preliminary work making inks from dyes and water. It works surprisingly well. Eventually I will try other ingredients.

 

Dip pens can be used with paints: gouache, watercolor, acrylics, possibly even egg tempera and casein/milk paints and more. Most/all of these look to me be a rapid clog issue with fountain pens.

 

Paints typically use pigments. Pigments are very small particles of colorant with a vehicle and binder. In watercolors the vehicle is water and binder is gum Arabic and sugar/honey. Oil paints linseed oil or walnut etc oil is both the vehicle and binder. Oils don’t dry, they harden/polymerize. Nothing evaporates out of oil paints as they come from the manufacturer. Some artists use thinners that evaporate but that’s not how fine art oil paints set up.

 

Most inks are made from dyes in water with some flow modifiers etc. Dyes dissolve in water. They are NOT particles as they are used. You can buy them as powders. But in water each dye molecule is separated from its brethren by a vast number of water molecules. Dye molecules are much bigger than water molecules—10-100x but they are almost unimaginably smaller than pigment particles even when the pigment particles are one thousandth or less of a millimeter. Pigment particles have a tendency to clump and clog things.

 

I spent a chunk of the day working with ~15 dye molecules. I decided to narrow my further work for a while to 5-6. A purple, two blues, a green, maybe a yellow, and a dark red. Preliminary study suggests that 1-10% w/v of ink is going to work great with just dye and water. Half of these molecules are known to have antibiotic and or antifungal properties, some are used as diagnostic agents.