Ink stick text
Working with sumi ink, you need three things: the ink, a brush, and an ink tray. The ink comes in hard stick form; you grind it into the tray with a little water to your desired shade, mix, brush. It’s been made in materially the same way since the 12th century BCE, mostly with a combination of soot & animal glue. The process is labor intensive & time consuming. In Japan, 90% of the country’s sumi ink is made in Nara, which is better known for the thousands of sort-of-trained deer that roam their parks & shrines, bowing for crackers and charming tourist hordes. We can spend all day discussing the deer, but we’re going to discuss sumi ink instead.
Watercolor on hard mode. How do you form a precise shade when you’re grinding a stick that is prone to imperfection & variation? Years of practice, probably, and a lot of screwing up. How do you know which inks yield which colors? Fly to Nara about it. The OG is Kobaien, which has been going since the 1500s. They understand, correctly, that there are thousands of forms of black. They also understand, correctly, that black is textural, that black has a form to it. The prices go north, and the general quality differentiator is whether the black becomes blacker than black, reflecting less light, gaining a deep sheen to it.
You care about very little of this. You set a price in your brain, recognizing that everything costs a little less on vacation, and walk directly into the middle of a 1,400-year-old tradition of craftsmanship that will never be fully legible to you, and proceed to loudly ask HEY WHATS IN THIS CHAT ROOM. You blow $50 on the stick, $30 on the ink well, and $40 on the brush, which sounds about reasonable, given what goes into making those objects. You head home, grind the ink without a plan, sit in front of a blank canvas, and for all of your time & effort to source this stuff a single tumbleweed rolls through the desert of your barren imagination. Fine. In the absence of a grand plan, you doodle.
You then imagine having all of the artmaking resources in the world and using them to doodle. What did it take to possess sumi ink 400 years ago? Probably only the richest people in the world had access to it, and now your untrained weirdo self is squigglin’ in your living room, 6,000 miles away from Nara. But also, this is how all expertise starts. You think about the time when you threw up a marketing page to run some A/B tests for people, having run precisely two A/B tests in your whole career. That was a monstrous clusterfuck for a long time, but 800 A/B tests later, it appears to have turned out okay for you.
And so you have a new problem, which is to find some paper that is both sufficient and cheap. And then you will use a lot of it, and someday you will become worthy of the flatly absurd thing you acquired and put in front of you. A new challenge.