(This is a guest post by Nick Folz. You can find more of Nick and his work on his blog, Smallberry Drive, Twitter, and Instagram.)
Let’s get the obvious misnomer out of the way: Walnut Ink is not made of walnuts. Instead, it aims to look like the walnut inks of antiquity, without some of those ink’s shortfalls. Before synthetic and India inks were widely available, lots of people made inks from walnut husks, people like Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt. Walnuts are plentiful, naturally occurring and it is actually fairly easy to make, but you don’t really want to boil walnut husks every time you want to ink something up. One of the side effects of walnut inks is that they are not completely acid free, so they slowly eat away paper as time marches on and would also lighten from the original dark or near black to the brown hues we associate with older illustrations. What is unique about Tom Norton Walnut Drawing Ink is that it aims to ape the aged look of walnut inks, with the added benefit of being acid free and easy to use and manipulate.
To show my bias early, I usually lean towards India inks. They dry fast, are waterproof and have a pleasant thickness to them. So when I inked up a brush with Walnut Ink I was surprised how light you could go with it. One dip of a brush can get you a wide variety of tones, largely dependent on how much of it you lay down at a time. The closest analogy I can think of is watercolors, which is not a bad thing. This comparison is double apt since this ink is not waterproof, so you can blend line work that has dried when you are laying in fills or shading. You can even go in with just water to spread out what you already have on the page. Working with an ink that was not waterproof threw me for a loop at first, but once I knew what to expect I really got into it and found it more forgiving that previously expected.