Solar Ink: Create natural Ink with Sun & Flowers

1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Anna Bern Sune, an artist, a professional mess makeer and a teacher. And in this short class, I'll show you how to create your own solar ink, a beautiful natural ink that develops color using sunlight and reacts to simple chemical changes. This is a fun and experimental process where you can extract pigments from flowers to make your own unique colors. You don't need special equipment, some everyday materials from your kitchen or garden, and, of course, some sun. By the end of this class, you'll have your own batch of solar ink to make your next piece of art with. Let's get started. 2. Supplies: The supplies you're going to need in this class are some petals. They could be from dried flowers or fresh flowers. You need a glass jar with a lid where you can put your petals in and some hot water, and you need a coffee filter to strain your ink, and of course, some sun to make the solar ink. And in your class resources, you'll find a recipe. If you want to modify the colors, you need a few cups. And of course, some modifiers like citric acid or baking soda. And now you need a container where you can store your ink in. If you want the color to last a bit longer, you'll add some cloves or clove oil to the mix. 3. Making Ink: We are going to make some solar ink. It's made by the sun, and you can make it from everything you find in your kitchen, but also in your garden. I take fresh flowers here. This is a Clendla or a golden flower, and I only need the flower petals that I collect in this jar. It gives more color when I use the dried, but you can also use the fresh. You can collect everything until the jar is full, but I think I'll leave it as is. I'm going to add some hot water until the petals are just underwater. If you leave it for a bit, you know if you need to add some more petals or need some boiling water. When it's done, I'm going to put the jar in the sun. It could be a window seat. But also outside just depending on the weather. And when the petals are getting a bit pie, you know it's time to extract. Usually, after about 24 hours or maybe three days, I was a bit impatient, but now I'm filtering them through the coffee filter. It could be that you use two times, except I think one is enough for this. This is a very slow process. You see some color here. But I'm afraid this one was just a bit low in color. Yes, and you see when I Look here. It's not as much color as I hoped it would be. But I think I should have taken a bit longer or taken some other flowers. I have some fresh tulips here, but they're still a bit too nice. I have to wait a bit. Now the tulips are dried out and I can take the petals. And I think I'm going to dry them a bit before I put them in a jar. Just to get some more color. And the jar I'm using again, is just a glass jar. This is just from some peanut butter. And I just cleaned it out. And now I'm going to put the petals in there. Scoff it just until the top, if you want to. The more petals, the more ink, and the more color your ink will have. And of course, I'm going to add some warm boiling water to them and put them in the sun again. And already, you see some coloring of the water. This one I think this one is going to pretty fast. I think the 24 hours will be enough for this one. So let me check. Yeah, there's a lot of pllness in the petals and a lot of color in the ink. So it's time to put them through the coffee filter. You can use the regular coffee filter, or you can use some kind of strainer to put it in. But mind you, this will take longer for it to drip, that's totally fine because it's a mtful job. I sometimes just get a bit impatient. I'm going to put the ink in here. Let me see there's already some coloring when I don't put petals in there. Sometimes if you put the petals in there, you see a different color, darker color than it actually is. Now I know, Yeah, this is fine. I'm going to strain this, so I don't have to put it back in the window again, in the sun again. Now we just wait until it just goes through the coffee filter. If it goes too slow, you can decide just to squeeze the filter so it goes through a bit faster like I'm doing here. But you don't need to take your time. 4. Modifying Colors: First, I put down the pure color. You see the pure color of these tulips. It's a bit dull. It's a bit pinkish, but still a bit dull. But now we got, like, the base color of our tulip. When I put my first modifier in there, it's like citric acid. I just put a pinch citric acid in there. And I'm going to steer it with my brush and immediately see the color change. And you even see it change on the paper. It's a lot brighter and a lot more fun to look at. But when I take different modifier, I'm taking the baking soda. Again, I put a pinch in there, and when I grab a brush to stir it, I'm grabbing a different brush because I don't want them to blend. And when I put it down, it's like a grayish green. It isn't a fact that I thought it would be, so I'm going to take some cleaning soda, some silver soda as well and see what happens if I put it in here. It's a different cup, and again, it's going to be a different brush with which I'm going to steer everything. It's a pinch. Anna steer. And when I put this down, you immediately see it's still a bit of a dull color, but it's a lot greener. And when you put it down, it will always dry up darker and sometimes even more vibrant. The next one I'm going to use is alum, a pinch again and see what happens. You see the silver soda is already a bit greener than it used to be. And now the Ellen, it starts out being a bit of purple, then it's grayish, and then all of a sudden, it's green again, almost the same color as the silver soda. That's something I didn't expect. Especially because in the cups, they're a totally different color. But that's what happens with modifiers, you never know what you're going to get, and that's the fun of solar ink making. Let's check out our colors. You see, these are darker already. And I'm going to put down what I did so I can remember. First one is, of course, the pure tulip. And then we used our citric acid. I wrote down citron acid just because in Dutch, we say citron citron. The bottom one was the baking soda, and I think it's a bit dull because it was past stew jade, but that's fine. Then the green ones. They look pretty similar. The first one we did was the silver soda. So that's the cleaning soda. That's totally different than the baking soda. And then we put down the alum. And, see, these are the colors the tulip made. But when I put the alum aside, I notice it's getting thicker, but it's also getting more purply. So I thought I'm going to put this down as well, and see what happens. It's Wow. This is a lovely purple color. The paper has an effect on the color, but also the time you put the modifiers in your ink. I like this one the best, I think. This is the one with citric acid. And I'm going to save this one. I'm going to put this in my container. Of course, you can do it with every color you like, but now I'm choosing to do the one with citric acid. I'm going to put it in there. You could also use the pipette. You can use a glass jar. You can use anything you like. I like those pipette jars, and I had one on hand. But if I want to save them longer, I'm going to use some cloves or clove oil to put in the container as well. And when I'm going to save them, I'm going to save them or store them in the fridge because then they will last longer, too. Otherwise, they get quite moldy quite easily, which is fine because you can take it off, but it's something you rather don't want to happen. And I put the lip on. Then, of course, I need to know what's in the container because I have loads of them. So I'm grabbing a label with what I put in there, the modifier, and the date. 5. Final Thoughts: That's it. You've now created your own natural solar ink. The colors will continue to change over time and making each batch unique. And if you enjoy the process, try experimenting with different flowers. Adjusting the waiting time or adding modifiers. I love to see what colors you create and feel free to share your swatches in the class project section. Thank you for joining this class. If you enjoy the class, please leave a review. And in the class resources, you'll find an illustrated recipe to repeat this process. So now it's your turn. Happy experimenting.