As depict­ed above, ink mak­ing is as volup­tuous a process as mak­ing a high end can­dy bar. Hav­ing grown up around the print­ing floor of a dai­ly news­pa­per, I know that ink’s pun­gent aro­ma is the oppo­site of chocolate‑y, but my mouth still start­ed to water. Was it the com­mer­cial-ready clas­si­cal sound­track or hear­ing Chief Ink Mak­er Peter Wel­fare com­par­ing the pigment’s gooey “vehi­cle” to hon­ey?

I won’t be dip­ping my tongue in the ink pot any time soon, but the mul­ti­step four col­or process by which pow­dered cyan, magen­ta, yel­low, and black hues become press-bound ink proved far more sen­su­al than expect­ed.

Ink mak­ing in the 21st-cen­tu­ry is a com­bi­na­tion of Old and New World tech­niques.

The his­to­ry of ink and print­ing is very old indeed. The Chi­nese devel­oped move­able type around 1045 and used it to print paper mon­ey. The Guten­berg Press was up and run­ning by 1440. The rollers, vats, and mix­ing tools in use at the Print­ing Ink Com­pa­ny, Wel­fare’s fam­i­ly busi­ness, are not so far removed from the tools used by ear­ly prac­ti­tion­ers.

Work­ers at the Print­ing Ink Comp­nany use their fin­gers to test their product’s tack­i­ness, a pre­dic­tor of its on-press per­for­mance. Pre­sum­ably, you devel­op a feel for it after a while.

State of the art com­put­er pro­grams pro­vide fur­ther qual­i­ty con­trol, ana­lyz­ing for con­sis­ten­cy of col­or and gloss with an accu­ra­cy that eludes even the most prac­ticed human eye.

The results can be seen on every­thing from brochures to fine art prints.

via Coudal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn How Crayons Are Made, Cour­tesy of 1980s Videos by Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

How Film Was Made in 1958: A Kodak Nos­tal­gia Moment

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Her play, Fawn­book, opens in New York City lat­er this fall. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

All of us who saw Juras­sic Park as kids, no mat­ter how much skep­ti­cism we’d pre­co­cious­ly devel­oped, sure­ly spent at least a moment won­der­ing if sci­ence could actu­al­ly bring dinosaurs back to life by pulling the DNA out of their blood trapped in amber-pre­served mos­qui­toes. It turns out that it can’t — at least not yet! — but even so, we had to admit that Steven Spiel­berg and his CGI-savvy col­lab­o­ra­tors (not to men­tion their huge bud­get) achieved, on screen, the next best thing. Even so, peo­ple have long dis­agreed about whether to call the visu­al res­ur­rec­tion of dinosaurs in the ser­vice of a block­buster adven­ture movie a work of art.

But what if we used the even more pow­er­ful data analy­sis and com­put­er graph­ics tech­nol­o­gy now at our dis­pos­al specif­i­cal­ly for the pur­pose of gen­er­at­ing a mas­ter­piece, or at least a piece by a mas­ter — by Rem­brandt, say? A project called The Next Rem­brandt has aimed to do just that with its attempt “to dis­till the artis­tic DNA of Rem­brandt” using every­thing from build­ing and ana­lyz­ing “an exten­sive analy­sis of his paint­ings [ … ] pix­el by pix­el,” to per­form­ing a demo­graph­ic study deter­min­ing his con­clu­sive por­trait sub­ject (“a Cau­casian male with facial hair, between the ages of thir­ty and forty, wear­ing black clothes with a white col­lar and a hat, fac­ing to the right”), to cre­at­ing a height map to mim­ic his phys­i­cal brush strokes.

“You could say that we use tech­nol­o­gy and data like Rem­brandt used his paints and his brush­es to cre­ate some­thing new.” Those bold words come from Ron Augus­tus, Microsoft­’s direc­tor of small- and medi­um-sized busi­ness mar­kets, in the pro­mo­tion­al video at the top of the post. His employ­er acts as one of two part­ners involved in The Next Rem­brandt, the oth­er being the Dutch bank ING — hence, pre­sum­ably, the choice of painter to res­ur­rect. Their com­bined resources have pro­duced a whol­ly the­o­ret­i­cal, but in a phys­i­cal sense very real, new “Rem­brandt” por­trait, metic­u­lous­ly 3D-print­ed at 148 megapix­els in thir­teen lay­ers of paint-based UV ink.

Despite its impres­sive plau­si­bil­i­ty, nobody expects the fruit of the Next Rem­brandt pro­jec­t’s con­sid­er­able labors, unveiled yes­ter­day in Ams­ter­dam, to hang in the Rijksmu­se­um next to The Night Watch. But it can, prop­er­ly con­sid­ered, teach us all a great deal about what, in the words of ING exec­u­tive cre­ative direc­tor Bas Korsten, “made Rem­brandt Rem­brandt.” And like any cut­ting-edge stunt, it also gives us a glimpse into what tech­nol­o­gy will soon­er or lat­er make pos­si­ble for us all. How long could we pos­si­bly have to wait before we can 3D-print, on can­vas with oil paint, por­traits of our­selves as Rem­brandt almost cer­tain­ly would have paint­ed us — or our very own Night Watch, indis­tin­guish­able from the orig­i­nal? Tru­ly, we stand on the cusp of a gold­en age of forgery.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

300+ Etch­ings by Rem­brandt Now Free Online, Thanks to the Mor­gan Library & Muse­um

A Final Wish: Ter­mi­nal­ly Ill Patients Vis­it Rembrandt’s Paint­ings in the Rijksmu­se­um One Last Time

16th-Cen­tu­ry Ams­ter­dam Stun­ning­ly Visu­al­ized with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Flash­mob Recre­ates Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” in a Dutch Shop­ping Mall

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.