Did you know? You can easily make inks from plants, flowers, fruit and vegetables! Simply boil them in a little water and filter the juice. In the tutorial below, I'll show you how to add vinegar or bicarbonate of soda to change the colour, sometimes in surprising ways!

Are you ready? Pick, harvest, cook and filter!

Here, we're going to make four different coloured inks using red cabbage and beetroot.

Hardware

  • Red cabbage
  • Beetroot (raw or cooked)
  • White vinegar
  • Bicarbonate of soda
  • Kitchen knife or mixer
  • Saucepan
  • Colander
  • Water
  • Bottles
  • Watercolour paper
  • Watercolour brush
Ingredients for making vegetable ink: vinegar, bicarbonate, beetroot, red cabbage.

Directed by

Red cabbage cut into small pieces in a bowl, ready to use for natural ink.

Stage 1

  • Finely chop the red cabbage.
Red cabbage simmering in a pan to extract its colour.

Step 2

  • Place half the mince in a saucepan and cover with water, just to the brim, without drowning it. Boil for 10 to 15 minutes.
Purple cabbage cooked in a pan with a bottle of vinegar in the background.

Step 3

  • Add 3 tablespoons of white vinegar during cooking to maintain the pink/purple colour of the cabbage. Leave to cool.
Filtration of the cooked purple cabbage to recover the coloured juice.

Step 4

  • Strain the juice through a sieve into a bottle.
Chopped red cabbage in water at the bottom of a yellow pan.

Step 5

  • Repeat step 2 with the other half of the mince.
Dark liquid extracted from cabbage with a box of bicarbonate of soda at the back.

Step 6

  • This time, while cooking, add a spoonful of bicarbonate of soda to turn the colour green. Be careful, the bicarbonate will cause the mixture to foam. Leave to cool.
Filtration of the dark green mixture obtained from cabbage and bicarbonate.

Step 5

  • Strain the juice into a bottle.
Ingredients and natural extracts based on red cabbage for making vegetable ink.

Step 5

  • Just look at how the simple addition of vinegar or bicarbonate can produce a variety of colours from the same plant material!
Beetroot and date juice, with cooked pieces.

Step 5

  • Follow the same steps with beetroot to obtain bright pink ink with vinegar and orange-yellow ink with bicarbonate of soda.
Floral paintings using natural vegetable ink.

Step 5

  • Use watercolour paper to create pretty illustrations with your inks. They are miscible with each other and you can obtain shades by adding water.
  • You'll notice that these inks tend to darken as they dry, particularly the purple of the red cabbage, which turns blue once dry. Similarly, when you mix certain inks directly on the paper, they can create an unexpected third colour when they mix: the purple of cabbage and the pink of beetroot sometimes turn green!

We hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

Don't hesitate to share your achievements on social networks by tagging us #salonCSF!