Aside from water, what is ink?
On a related note, what is paint (aside from water/oil)…where does the “color” come from?
mmmm…
The color/colour is in the eye of the beholder… for me, color blindness is an issue… how indebth do you want to go with this one?
You could pretty much say… why do you see that leaves are green?? the light is beamed to it… and only the green is reflected back , because the leaf absorbed all the colours that were not green… although thats just what I think… erm… scratch head…
Please define “…what does the color come from…”
Are you asking what the other ingredients are? Color comes from pigments. Pigments being, of course, colored chemcials.
Wasnt paint made by the grounding and liquifying of bark??
The simplest India ink is made of:
[li]lamp black (produces the color)[/li][li]gum arabic (controls the viscosity of the ink, to make it less watery)[/li]
For paint, the color used to come from rocks and minerals of the right color that were ground into powder. Nowadays I assume they just use chemicals directly.
Somewhere in the depths of my brain I seem to recall:
Paints and such consist of thre things:
1.) pigment -- the stuff that gives it color
2.) vehicle -- the stuff that keeps it fluid so you can brush it on, then evaporates later.
3.) binder -- the stuff that keeps it from sliding off the surface after th vehicle has dried.
Old inks were made from oak-gall and such, I understand, and actually caused the aper to deteriorate slightly – it didn’t really need a binder, since the paper was permanently marked. In time this could even eat through paper, making the oldest documents very fragile. The shift from these inks came when they went from goose-quill pens to steel nibs. The same acdic inks also rusted the pen nibs quickly, so they stopped using suc acidic ink and intead added “gum arabic” to the mixture of vehicle (water and/or alcohol, I’ll bet) and pigment (lampblack - really fine carbon-- probably) to help it stick to the paper.
There HAVE to be entire websites devoted to this, but I’m too lazy to look them up.
There are several variants to the ink and paint theme. CalMeacham is on the right track.
The difference between ink and paint is that ink is just a coloration of a surface, paint is a thick layer of binder holding a suspension of pigment particles, applied over a surface.
Paint has a binder. Like for example, oil paint is composed of particles of pigment suspended in linseed oil, turpentine is used as a solvent. When the turpentine evaporates, the oil hardens into a translucent polymer plastic with pigment in suspension. You can load a lot of pigment into paint.
Ink generally has no binder. The pigments are dissolved in a solvent (i.e. water) and are deposited directly onto the paper.
There are many variations. For example, watercolors use pigment, gum arabic binder, and water for solvent.
I guess I was shooting for a little deeper. Recently I’ve taken quite an interest in the “origins” of various products, back to its’ natural level (and geographic origin).
So, for example,
What is gum arabic and where does it come from? I’m not looking for a chemical composition, just what plant or tree the base ingredients come from…
Well, indigo comes from indigo plant.
But really, if you’re looking for the origin of every pigment out there, that’s just a bit beyond the scope of these boards. I’d suggest either narrowing down your question or doing a search on google.
FYI, Gum Arabic comes from the Gum Acacia tree. The best ones (for artists’ grade materials) are in Somalia.
Well, you got the “binder” part right, anyway.
Wet paint is composed of solvent, pigment and resin (or binder). Dry paint is composed of pigment and binder. (And there are some additives present in small amounts that don’t quite fit into any of these categories.) Vehicle is defined as everything but pigment (i.e. solvent and resin). The definition you gave for vehicle above is actually the definition of a solvent.
Pigment is defined as any solid particles that remain in the dry paint film and are not dissolved in the resin system. (A coloration that dissolves in the resin system would be a dye, not a pigment.) Most paint is loaded with pigments (such as talc or calcium carbonate) that are actually transparent in the paint film because their refractive index is relatively close to the refractive index of the resin system. These pigments are called filler or extender pigments and are there to make the film harder. The pigments that provide opacity and/or color are called prime pigments. Opacity is provided by pigments with a high refractive index (like titanium dioxide) and color by pigments that absorb certain colors. There are also other pigments that do things like protect against corrosion. Overall, pigments that are used for color probably are in the minority.
If you want to hear more about the refractive index/transparency business, look at the thread about glycerine soap.