Water and ink to the limits

On my website you can see a series of drawings I made with water and ink. Go to merlesibbel .nl and and the top of the page, click on 'ink'. I love how the ink bleeds in the water. It makes it hard though to handle the material. The drawings easy become an abstract blur of ink in which detail and contour get lost. So my goal in this week was to try to control the ink flowing in the water. After some research I found things about ferrofluid online: an ink you can manipulate with a magnet. So I wanted to try and combine the bleeding of the ink in water and the manipulating of the ink with a magnet.

First I made an electromagnet with some wire, a nail and the power source in the interaction station. Then I gathered some iron-dust in the material station. I just put that in my ink to see if that would work. I put don a paper and over the paper a placed a glass plate, so the iron wouldn't just sick to the magnet. Then I tried it. The electro-magnet turned out to be too weak to have a great result so I used an small, stronger magnet from the interaction station. Now my plan did sort of work[1]. There was one big problem: the iron-particles were way to big and would just clot together. This was not what I wanted, so I would have to try something different.

So I needed to make a much more liquid ink and I needed a stronger magnet. I used a bigger nail and thinner wire to make a stronger electromagnet, but it was still a very weak magnet so I decided to stick with the small magnets from the interaction station. I looked up more ways to make ferrofluid online and then used toner powder (which turned out to contain iron) and oil. It worked, I had made a nice fluid ink, probably magnetic. My next step was to test the ink again. This time I used 3 liquids to dissolve the ink in, for my magnetic ink was oil-bases instead of water-based like my other ink. I used oil, water and spiritus. I had the little strong magnet from the interaction station and a bigger, weaker magnet. The oil, water and spiritus I poured onto a glass plate. After that I put a drop of magnetic ink in the fluid. The glass plate was higher than my table, so I could put the magnets under the glass to manipulate the fluids.The glass was pretty thick so keeping the magnet above the fluid worked better than when the magnet had to do its work through the glass. This means I need an even stronger magnet or an ink with more iron in it. This will be my next step. My experiments are in this[2] youtube-playlist.

The reaction of the magnetic fluid with the other fluids was very nice to see. In the oil, the ink bled really well. In the water, the ink did bleed but (because of the oil-water relation) still stuck together, which was a really nice contrast. In the spiritus, the ink stuck together and didn't bleed at all. Very strange and funny.

I'm sorry for my poor camerawork. Concentrating on working with the magnet, watching the ink react and keeping my camera still and steady was quit hard. I hope it is clear tough what happend in my experiments.