Remember how I said this wasn't a reference heavy blog? Keep that in mind.
I've been researching pigments used to produce playing cards. These run the gamut of medieval resources. You can find playing cards that are miniature (or not so miniature, Stuttgart Cards I'm looking at you) paintings. Multiple layers of paper glued together, a gesso prep layer (burnished even), ink, paint, gold leaf, silver leaf and the whole shebang. The Cloister's Cards are another good example of this. The earliest references to card makers are people who were also painters.
At the other end of the scale you can find the mass-produced two and three color cards that came out of the French, German, and Italian factories to supply the domestic and foreign markets. These could be fairly crude affairs and might even have been painted by finger (yeah, I mean finger-painted). These used, at most, five colors and were very definitely not hand painted works of art. When these were not hand-painted (or finger-painted) the ink seems to have typically been applied using stencils rather than multiple blocks. I've found a couple of references to stencil use in the 14th Century and a lead(!) stencil for a rosette from the same time period (holdings of the British Museum). But the first reference to using stencils for making cards is in a census from a town in mid-15th Century Germany.
Inks! I was talking about inks! The National Gallery of Art performed an analysis of the pigments used to color the medieval (15th Century) woodcuts in their collection. Here's a link to a summary.
http://artinprint.org/article/coloring-within-the-lines-the-use-of-stencil-in-early-woodcuts/
Here's a quote from that summary:
Scientific analysis of the paints used on early woodcuts indicates that colorists favored inexpensive, water-based paints in a limited palette that included both mineral and organic or dye-based pigments. Typical colors include green (copper-based), orange (lead-based), red (possibly brazilwood- or madder-dye-based), blue (possibly indigo- or woad-dye-based) and yellow (possibly buckthorn-, saffron- or weld-dye-based). Various tones of purple were created using a mixture of red and blue, and a dye-based green paint could be made with a mixture of yellow and blue. Paints on many stencil-colored prints have a smooth, matte appearance because colorists learned to modify their paints by adding chalk (calcium carbonate) to the mixtures, formulating viscous paints that could be applied in even layers that would dry faster and would not bleed beyond the outline of the stencil.Awesome stuff, right? Tons more information in there and, as always, check the bibliography, kids. I was feeling rather chuffed that I'd guessed the composition of a lot of the inks based on how they had aged and how they interacted with the black ink on the cards. The quote above lists red as being an organic-derived ink, but later in the article they show another red-orange that is lead-based. I can find examples of both kinds of red being used on playing cards.
Which brings up another good point. Saying I've been researching inks used on playing cards is like saying I've been researching medieval books. When? Where? Ultimately general knowledge needs to be applied to specific cases and that's not always possible. In decks where only the black and white remnants survive it can be impossible to know what colors should be used to recreate that deck. Part of me thinks that's tragic and part of me says 'Oh, well.'
Some random stuff:
-Ink is made in the same way as paint except the binder is typically gum arabic rather than egg-white or egg-yolk. In general. You mix a powder that can be derived from organic (brazilwood, berries, saffron, etc...) or inorganic (clay, copper sulfate, copper acetate, lead carbonate, etc...) sources with water and use gum arabic (dried acacia tree sap) as the binder. Other things can be added to change the color, alter the consistency of the paint, prevent it from spoiling and etc..
-Gutenberg's many contributions to the art of printing included creating a reliable oil-based ink.
-Inks sometimes included an acidic component that helped bring out color and helped the ink sink into the fibers of the paper. That acid could also contribute to destroying the paper over time.
Edit to add some links:
http://www.jcsparks.com/painted/recipes.html
Came across a reference to 18th Century inks for playing cards in Hungary being made with soot (lampblack) and starch glue (wheat paste), in the case of black, and pigments ground with flour in the case of colors. It was a little unclear to me how the non-black colors were done. It would seem to make sense to use the same process for black as for the other colors, just change the pigments used. But the language seems to indicate a difference in the process. Perhaps the black pigment was added to the starch glue rather than being added in as part of the glue-making process?
