Blacks (carbon dyes)

The starting material for black is organic compounds of plant and animal origin, turned into charcoal, fossil or carbon black. Raw materials include linden wood, grape branches and animal bones.
These products are subjected to dry distillation without air, resulting in more or less pure charcoal.
Burning various oils with little air in special apparatuses, yields carbon black and coal. Carbon black and charcoal were used as dyes in deep antiquity.

Properties:
1. non-poisonous.
2. resistant to light.
3. free-drying.
4. durable in combinations.
5. well opaque.

Ivory

Raw material - ivory. Currently from ordinary bone.
Pure black tone, with whites - pearl shade. Oil takes 100%, dries slowly.
Recognition:
Burnt in the air gives white ash.

Burnt bone

Black with a reddish tint (even in splits). Species-wise inferior to ivory, it fades in the light and dries worse.

Wine black

A bluish hue (in breakdowns, too). It is produced by charring young vine shoots.
It belongs, on a par with ivory black, to the better grades.
It is used in all techniques.
The above blacks have a very low specific gravity and are therefore difficult to grind with both oil and watercolor binders.
Before rubbing with oil, it is good to moisten the powdered black with gasoline, and before rubbing with adhesives - with spirit.

Chinese black

A copolymer formed by burning grout oil (obtained from the oily seeds of a tree that grows in China and India).
The dye is very fine, oily, very slow-drying, well covering and strongly coloring. It should be used very carefully in oil painting due to slow drying (cracking).