Tag Archives: media

Read all about it!

Newspapers were the natural next step after printers saw the success of pamphlets. A newspaper is published regularly (daily or weekly), it tells its readers the important news, and printers can sell advertising space in it. A newspaper could carry more than one essayist to write opinion pieces.
By the later years of the 1700s, essayists were writing their opinions in the newspapers. Successful newspapers had a large circulation—meaning: many people bought and read that newspaper. The bigger your circulation, the more you can charge for advertising space. Advertising revenue is what makes a newspaper profitable. The way to get a big circulation is to hire writers whose stuff people want to read.
What kind of stuff? One hot topic was taxes. In the American colonies, people were fed up with an overbearing government that imposed high taxes on everything. There was even a tax on newspapers and pamphlets. The problem was: colonists had no say in how they were governed from England—they had no representatives in Parliament to make laws or vote on their behalf. King George III thought of the American colonies as not much more than a money-making machine for the British treasury. He needed buttloads of cash to support his enormous empire. So, he taxed his colonial subjects. If they didn’t pay their taxes, there were plenty of George’s soldiers to throw them in jail.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/no-taxation-without-representation#:~:text=In%201768%2C%20the%20catchphrase%20of,grew%20more%20and%20more%20popular.

Ink

Okay, we got the paper, we got the pens and brushes—now we need the medium: ink.

Medium (singular), media (plural) are Latin words.

Medium is the word we artists use when we talk about the substance used to make marks—ink, paint, crayon, pencil, pastel, chalk. Every medium needs 2 parts: pigment and binder. The pigment is the color. You get pigment from vegetable, animal, or mineral sources. The binder is what holds the pigment together and makes it stick to a surface like paper. Liquid medium needs a third part: solvent.



To get black pigment, the Egyptians used the same stuff they did in pre-historic times: burned bones. When bones burn they turn black and brittle. The scribes ground them into a powder. You can use charcoal from wood, too.

This is a stone mortar and pestle—the tools you use to grind something into a powder.

To hold the powder together, they used the sap from the acacia tree. It’s called Gum Arabic and is still used in watercolor today. Gum Arabic is water-soluble. The Egyptian scribes would dry out the gum, grind it into a powder, mix it with burnt-bone powder and add water. They might add very little water to make a thick paste which they could form into a cake.

The round shapes at the top of this scribe’s kit are ink-cakes.

After the cake dried, a scribe could carry it around with him and reactivate the ink by adding a bit of water with his brush. Water is the solvent. If you’ve painted with a box of pan watercolors you understand what I mean. The scribe wrote on the papyrus with brush or pen and when the ink dried the pigment stayed there for thousands of years.

A set of pan watercolors

When they’re exposed to water and air, metals oxidize or corrode. As they do, they produce a colored outer layer. The Egyptians got red pigment by scraping the rust from iron. They got green or blue by scraping the corrosion off of copper.

http://www.teachinghistory100.org/objects/about_the_object/ancient_egyptian_writing_equipment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gum_arabic
https://www.zmescience.com/science/copper-traces-egypt-inks/
The egyptologist in this article says ‘infers’ but he means ‘implies:’
https://phys.org/news/2020-10-red-black-ink-egyptian-papyri.html
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/medium?src=search-dict-box
This book is a must-read if you’re interested in color:
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Natural-History-Victoria-Finlay/dp/0812971426/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=color&qid=1604924820&s=books&sr=1-5
https://www.dickblick.com/products/crayola-washable-watercolor-pan-sets/

Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.