India ink as primary paint?

[vossiewulf]

Anyone tried this? In my continued experimentation with about every step of my first ship I've been working through various options for paint; it's easy enough for me to do a perfectly level painted surface in most cases, but that would be extremely inaccurate, I'm looking for something more organic, allowing the character of the wood to show but at correct scale- grain bumps/grooves that scale out to two and three inches high/deep are just as bad as a perfectly smooth finish.

 

I remembered I have a nice set of india inks that promise to be lightfast and waterproof, and I also know from previous experience that it can be applied as glaze coats and have a bit more translucency than paint, so I decided to try the red (which is pretty close to most versions of RN bulkhead red) on a piece of boxwood, which is what the inner gunwales of my little cutter are planked with.

 

This is the plank sanded cleanly with 400 grit and then given one "coat" of ink, which is really about three passes with thin glaze coats, waiting about 30 seconds between. The color is good but the grain has been raised considerably.

 

 

This is after three "coats" (~ 9 glaze coat passes) with sanding between, first with 1200 that took it almost to bare wood again and second time with 2000 that was as much leveling as possible without removing significant color.

 

Diffuse color. Harder to see here than in real life, but it has visibly more translucency than paints (that have effectively 0) while still having nice color saturation. I like the effect overall.

 

 

And here's what the surface looks like. I also like this scale-wise, mine being 1:64- this seems pretty close to me for that scale.

 

 

 

So, pros:

 

• Perfect consistency for brush painting
• Goes on with zero brush marks as glaze coats, looks like 2-3 would be = to typical brush painted coat
• Can be semi-transluscent allowing some of the wood to show. Translucency can be controlled between somewhat translucent to 0 translucent with complete color saturation
• Coats can be sanded < 5 minutes after final glaze coat. No kidding, dries fast. Use a hairdryer on low and you could run through the whole three coats and two sandings continuously with no significant waiting
• Seems reasonably tough, more so than I thought it would be and certainly more than Tamiya paints. A little piece of dust got in a coat and dried before I saw it, and it took a surprising amount of effort and resorting to putting on magnifiers to dig that little bastard out of the finish. But the scene of the crime disappeared completely with the next sanding and coats.

 

Cons:

 

• ?

 

Any experience/thoughts appreciated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[jbshan]

Cons:  (?)

If there is some glue on the surface, does the ink show up different where the glue spots are?  Paint will go right over and result in a uniform coating.

If you still need to do some gluing, can you scrape back any ink or do you need to, in order to get the glue to penetrate and give a good joint?  Some folks like to paint pieces individually then assemble for good color separation.

 

Pros:  (?)

Black India Ink does a pretty good job at imitating ebony, an evil wood and to be avoided, but it's a nice rich black.

[vossiewulf]

1 hour ago, jbshan said:

Cons:  (?)

If there is some glue on the surface, does the ink show up different where the glue spots are?  Paint will go right over and result in a uniform coating.

If you still need to do some gluing, can you scrape back any ink or do you need to, in order to get the glue to penetrate and give a good joint?  Some folks like to paint pieces individually then assemble for good color separation.

 

Pros:  (?)

Black India Ink does a pretty good job at imitating ebony, an evil wood and to be avoided, but it's a nice rich black.

 

Bolded one very good point (well they all are but this one is possibly a blocker). I try extremely hard to not have glue on my surfaces anywhere but that doesn't mean I'm 100% successful. And I'm guessing it would bead and I'm not sure it wouldn't also bead if I put down a clear flat coat or something. I'll have to go experiment.

 

I've always liked india black so yes that was another potential reason. If you go through my build log you'll see I've tested with dyes and my current plan is to use aniline dyes to take the boxwood to black, and I'm using dyes for the same reason I'm testing ink, it doesn't completely hide the wood. But the black dyes I have tested all seem to have a pretty red hue, enough to be noticeable and a more pure black would be better.

 

Anyway, thanks Joel, will post back here with what I find.