Making Walnut Ink

Artist Fiona McIntyre explains the process of making Walnut Ink

For the 2020 Urban Tree Festival, Fiona drew an ancient oak tree and demonstrated how to make oak gall ink. This year she shows us how to make walnut ink.

Fiona used the walnut ink to draw the walnut tree pictured above, watch the drawing being executed below.

About Fiona

Fiona McIntyre is an experienced artist, dedicated tutor, public speaker and founding member of 'The Arborealists' art movement founded in 2013. She has developed her profound love and connection to landscape and trees during a peripatetic upbringing which took her as a child from Ireland to Scotland where her forester grandfather introduced her to the pine forests of Argyll. She spent several years practising at studios in Sweden and Spain from where she experienced a rich variety of natural and urban environments, all of which has informed the development of her distinctive gestural and emotive colourist paintings with their passionate interest in the links between contemporary art, ecology, sacred landscape and trees. In 2019 she took part in an acclaimed exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery ‘The Romantic Thread in British Art - Turner to Le Brun’. McIntyre exhibited the painting ‘Zina at Marston Hill House’, an oil painting on linen depicting a cherry blossom tree in autumn next to pale blue Victorian corrugated sheds and a Munch-like depiction of her daughter dressed in a floor-length cinnabar skirt which appeared to dissolve into the fallen leaves. This nod to Contemporary Romanticism is a cry for the preservation of places of spirit which maintain and inspire our connection to the planet. The Harnhill oak trees have particularly attracted the artist as fantastic examples of trees with great resonance and soul standing undisturbed for many hundreds of years surviving disease, storms and over-zealous tree surgeons. 

McIntyre is currently focusing on traditional ancient drawing materials and pigments and she incorporates this knowledge and experience demonstrating and guiding students. She is a regular tutor at the Marlborough College Summer School, and gives many talks on her own work as well as on the painter Malcolm Drummond of the 1912 Camden Town Group (her great grandfather), and talks on collaborative art and ecology projects. 

She exhibits regularly in the UK and Europe and has work in private and public collections. 

Why Artists Paint Trees

An illustrated talk by Fiona McIntyre