“I became really intrigued in the history of [ink making]. As a medium to record history, ink itself wasn’t actually recorded — the process of making ink wasn’t super well known. I started thinking about it as this interesting kind of magic,” Thomas Little, an illustrator, ink maker, and citizen alchemist from rural North Carolina told me. He has been making ink for the last six years but his first attempt started much earlier.
“The first time I made ink I was actually in the fifth grade when I was doing a project on Houdini. It was a magic trick that involved a water to wine sort of chemical reaction. At that time I didn’t know but I was essentially doing the ink process — the actual chemical reaction. That didn’t go over very well.” Little grew up in religious and rural North Carolina and water to wine is just close enough to mocking Jesus: “That wasn’t real popular.”
