The first thing to know about making ink is that it takes patience. I'm working on 48 hours of reducing this coffee, vinegar, salt ink. I started at 4.5 cups total ingredients and am down to less than a half a cup. I think this will finally be dark enough to paint with. Hopefully, anyway. I am also saving up all of the charcoal I burn for frankincense in order to make India ink. It's slow going, as always, but my plan then is to get a bunch of barbecue charcoal and cook with a metal grate over my fire pit. It's rainy season so there is no fire risk, and it's always nicer to be outside than inside.
I would very much like to try to make colored ink. My goal is either green ink or golden ink. I know I can squish berries and use their ink, and there is a big blackberry thicket right outside my house, but a deep forest green sounds so lush and exciting. I also saw this thing where you can hook a car battery up to a cast iron pot and a metal plate and in a baking soda solution you can extract the rust from the iron, which I'd like to try to turn into a golden ink color. But I don't know how I'd get the rust & water separate from the baking powder without a distiller, which is expensive and bulky.
We'll see tomorrow if I can find enough new grass shoots to try to make some green ink from the chlorophyl.