Hi everyone! Shirin here sharing another memorable story from my stay at Rimbun Dahan. One of the fun job hazards of work in Wild Dot is the ample gifts from friends when they happen to have some incidental colours on hand for us to experiment with!
A typical day usually involves some of the artists cooking up their daily meals and red cabbage happened to be one of the ingredients that was up on the menu. You could say I was pretty much excited to have some opportunistic colours to experiment with at hand (literally).
Most colours that are received are initially discards from cooking. To convert it into a drawable ink on the other hand, would require much more simmering down in order to have a strong colour that can be applied onto paper.
You can see how much liquid I have evaporated over time to achieve enough opacity to be able to use as a vibrant ink. Occasionally, I would enhance the ink flow and volume of the liquid through additives such as gum arabic.
Evaporating a huge batch of red cabbage liquid took the whole day, and I eventually left it in an open jar for the night to allow further evaporation. I was hoping to paint with it the following day… however a little creature in the dead of the night had first dibs on my very nutritious red cabbage (essence of cabbage!?)
Unfortunately not enough ink was left for me to make an artwork; however I decided to have a little fun musing over a version of “Hansel and Gretel” from a piece of paper that had coincidentally captured the ratty red cabbage footprints.
Interestingly, the inky footprints did not leave a purple colour that Red Cabbage would normally give. Perhaps it had oxidized under whatever else the rat had been stepping on?
Whichever the case, I suppose I am not the only resident artist in the studio at that point in time exploring their creativity and gut feeling! Hope you enjoyed this fun little sharing of my experience with red cabbage!
Till next time,
Shirin
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