How I TAN PAPER with Walnut Ink | CALLIGRAPHY | PAPER | WRITING

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Hi everybody. My name is Elise Wong and today I will share how I tan my paper for calligraphy to give it that fancy aged look.

I use arto camp so sketchpad. I like the thickness of it as well as the absorbency and smoothness for calligraphy writing. If you do a quick research on how to tan paper, a lot of sites would suggest to use tea or coffee to tan it. I’m not a scientist but i thought about it and wondered how as an artist, we always look for acid free paper to make it more archival. However tea and coffee is acidic so it would neutralise the acid free buff the paper provides. If you feel like this doesn’t bother you then by all means, please proceed to use tea and coffee. It is after all a more natural approach to colouring and may even yellow more as time goes by. Personally, I don't know what I want out of these calligraphy. I may want to add colour to them and let that colour be vibrant for a long time, I'm not sure so I figured this is a safer way to make it more archival.

I use regular walnut ink, nothing fancy. Then I prepare an aluminium baking tray for the tan bath. Make sure there is water and a little bit of the ink. Just grandma measure the amount, however dark you want. I would maybe put about a teaspoon in there. I dunk the paper in, you can let it soak for 10 seconds on both sides. I don't want to soak it for too long because I don't want the integrity of the paper to be too weak to handle that it may tear in the process. After that I place the soaked paper on a silicon mat, you can dry this in a few ways; there's the oven and the hairdryer if you're feeling a little impatient. Or you can also allow it to airdry. My oven broke when I was recording this so I opted to let it to air dry as I did other work.

After the first dip, you can start to see how the paper is already looking lightly tanned. It really depends how aged you want your paper to look, if you want it to look darker then you would have to do this process a few times. For this, I had to do this like four times. You can also allow it to soak a little longer during the bath process, I just dunk the paper in then flip then took it out, I didn't let it soak as long. Sometimes, the coloured water has pooled in a specific point and gives some patterns which gives it some character.

With my experiments, I find air drying it gives an even aged look with the edges a little darker than the middle. However, if you dry it fast via a hair dryer and/or oven. It gives a more dotted pattern as the water within the fibres dried faster. Also, the base of where you put the paper may affect the end product. If you put it on a flat pan, the water will dry evenly as opposed to if you put it on a wire rack, the water will pool in between the wires and you would have a lined pattern when dried so it doesn't look as natural. These are my findings and do with it what you will :)

I wanted a lighter tan that was not too aged. For this, I wrote Blackletter fonts and looks super medieval which was the look I was going for.