There’s Black and There’s Black
I’ve been working on a design for a contemporary wall case and decided I wanted a light, figured wood for the body with a black wood for the top and bottom. I have some curly maple that will be great for the light wood, but I wasn’t so sure about the black wood. Ebony is notoriously temperamental when it comes to working it and has a nasty reputation for suddenly splitting long after you believe all danger is past. One alterative I’d recently read about involved treating walnut with a somewhat caustic chemical to blacken it – possible but not real appealing. Then I recalled reading that India ink worked well to blacken almost any wood.
After a bit of Googling around I’d found out that India ink is simply super fine carbon in a solvent and a binder. Solvents and binders are no big deal, and you and I are made of lots of carbon, so it passes the safety test. Another bonus is that carbon, being an element, simply won’t fade and is as black as black gets. So off to the art store…
They only had the little 2oz bottle, but I figured it would do to experiment with even if I used it all up. Found some scrap birch ply and a foam brush an a pair of dish washing gloves (it may not be dangerous but apparently it stains like anything) and was ready to go. Probably take a few coats to get real black… a bit on the tip of the brush… let’s see what happens… Dang! That’s black! Wow! It couldn’t have taken more that a few drops to turn a 4 inch square jet black.
It has a nice texture that doesn’t look painted and the grain looks unchanged. Just a few minutes after applying the ink it looked dry so I tried really scrubbing at it to see if I could smear it. With a bit of work I could create a slight smudge (visible at the top of the image) but it seemed stable. I tried a quick coat of an oil/varnish mix to see if the ink would stay in place while top coating and had no problem whatsoever. You can see in the image that it held all the small detail where the foam brush left some hair lines at the transition with no bleeding. It actually held so well it makes me wonder if I could use India ink to monogram box tops and such…. something to try another day.
For now though, I do believe I’ve found my ebony substitute.
Brian Todoroff
Contributing Editor, Nothing Severed Yet
www.nothingseveredyet.com
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