Roselle and Red Spider Lily are interesting autumn flowers are full of anthocyanin, a pH sensitive compound, so what you see isn’t necessarily what you get when you make color with them. But the changes are predictable.

Anothcyanin Colors

• pH under 3.2 (very acidic) the color is red;
• pH 3.2 – 5.2 (acidic) the color shifts into violet;
• pH 5.2 – 8.2 (neutral-ish) anthocyanins are light blue;
• pH above 8.2 (base/alkaline), the color changes to dark green.

If you’ve ever added lemon or vinegar to your red cabbage to help it keep its bright color, you’ve put this science into action.

Roselle

Roselle hibiscus are popular in Japan and I grew a few plants to see how they’d do in my garden. They produced pretty well and I collected a double handful of calyxes.

For color making, I played with my usual three techniques and ended up with several distinct colors.

Alcohol Ink

Alcohol extractions can be incredible or an abject failure; I find there’s little in between. I love how alcohol interacts on paper – soaking in, spreading, drying around the edges, making crazy shapes when it touches water. It’s a lot of fun.

Roselle extracts nicely into a sharp, bright pink alcohol ink that looks so pretty in the bottle (pictured above on the right). It color changes to a bright blue with pink tinges.

Water Based Ink

Water based ink is my workhorse in the studio. I use it liberally so I always want to have lots of it on hand.

For my roselle ink, I used last year’s dried calyxes (thanks, Chio!) and made color tea by simmering them in tap water for a couple of hours. I got good quantity of deep purple-red that I split into two parts – one to simmer further into ink and one to lake for a dry pigment.

I alternated a gentle boil (for speed) with gentle simmering to get the ink reduced to about 1/3 of the original volume. Then I added gum arabic watercolor base and a few drops of clove oil to the bottle.

The red ink turned out nicely. It dries purple-red on the page (indicating that it is an acid). I ended up with two different hues, too, from the lake process.

Lake Pigment

The lake was a failure. Maybe there was too much color in it, but it bubbled completely out of its beaker. When I checked it the next day, there was no precipitate at all. I had violet-blue liquid.

An opportunity! I turned it into Roselle Blue ink using the same simmering technique as the red. It became a rich blue liquid and a pretty blue-grey when it dries.

Fortunately, I still had enough roselle tea to try again.

Recently, I bought Joanne Green’s book, Natural Color Paint Making. She uses alum and chalk for her lakes rather than alum and soda ash, and I decided to give her method a try on the second round – why buy a book for info that you don’t use?

It worked very well. Of course, adding the chemicals triggered a color change. The color that precipitated out was blue, leaving a purplish liquid; I washed the lake once to get rid of some of the chemicals, then I filtered off the precipitate and let it dry.

The lake powder is a pale blue, which will turn darker when mixed into paint. I am looking forward to playing with this over the winter.

And I saved the wash water to make Roselle Lake Ink by simmering it down. The liquid is purplish blue. On paper, it dries down to a greenish grey, showing me that it is alkaline.

Red Spider Lily

Red spider lily, called higanbana in Japanese, is a special seasonal flower. It blooms right at the equinox, one of the semi-annual grave cleaning days. It seems to come from nowhere and blooms all at once. The bulbs contain lycorine (as do daffodils) and are toxic to many insects and animals, so they are often found along the embankments of rice fields. We have a lot of them at Oyama Senmaida.

Alcohol Ink

The petals give up their bright red easily and quickly to the alcohol. In fact, we used them in the “Let’s Art” workshop for their easy success. The color is a slightly more purple than roselle’s alcohol ink. On paper, the ink dries to bluish tones.

Water Based Ink

I produced only one small jar of Higanbana Ink. It’s incredible – deep and varigated; I wish I had more. But I prioritised my material to make lake, and though I planned to simmer another batch of blossoms for ink, time ran away from me.

Lake Pigment

When I laked the higanbana color tea, it went a vivid purple. The anthocyanin change happened strongly. I went out to check on it one evening and shone a light through it. Wow!

I used the chalk method to precipitate the pigment and washed it twice. The color is divine. It’s not dry yet, but you can see both the dark purple on the damp filter and the edge of lighter dried purple.

However, I will be careful about using this one. Why? The lake smells awful – like stale vomit or feces. It’s nasty.

Did I do something wrong? Is this just how it smells? The North Carolina Extension service says that a different flower in the same family smells bad for the first twelve hours after blooming. I haven’t noticed that with spider lilies, but…

I wanted to know more, so searched around for information about color made with Red Spider Lily – maybe a dye or someone making ink or paint. There is nothing. Even Claude.ai, searching for me in Chinese and Korean, found no information.

And that is strange. Almost every plant has some trace of color history even when they don’t produce good color. Fugitive colors, dull browns, they all have some kind of reference somewhere. But red spider lilies do not.

I guess that the stinky lycorine plus unstable anthocyanin makes this an undesirable option for color. I am glad that I tried it, though. I learned so much.

And I am going to paint with the higanbana lake; I just might make sure it’s in a frame afterwards.