The Full Story
About Us
Sisters Ink was born in early Spring 2022, but the story really begins a decade before in 2012. This is the year we, as a family, decided to side-step Christmas consumer chaos and begin giving handmade gifts at Christmas.
We’re a creative family. A few of us are artists; we have an illustrator, an oil painter and two tattoo artists. We also have a carpenter, a builder, a gardener and a chef. So, this style of gift giving is fun and often competitive. Over the years the gifts exchanged have been quirky, inventive, useful and very much loved.
In 2022, when mum, Nicole was trying to think of a handmade gift to give her very creative daughters she was stumped. She had a box full of pigments and oxides left over from a previous project and had the idea to make paints. She researched the different techniques and ingredients for both oil paints and watercolours, read about the traditional paint making techniques, watched tutorials on colour theory and then cleared off the dining room table and had a go. She began by making the oil paints. After a few days, a lot of mess, and some frustration, she had made 10 yet-to-be-tested tubes of paint to give to Mim (the oil painter).
She then moved onto the watercolours and within hours, and not so much mess, she had filled 24 beer caps with a colourful range of yet-to-be cured watercolours.
Nicole says...
“The process of mixing each colour with the binding solution is mesmerising and hypnotic, almost mediative. Working with colours in this way was like therapy. I stashed the 24 paint filled caps in a secret place and waited about 4 weeks for them to dry. In the meantime, I commissioned a ceramicist to make 2 palettes to fit the beer caps. Fast forward to Christmas and my gifts were appreciated but outdone on the day by handmade giant wind chimes. A few weeks later and after the excitement of summer, both my daughters had used the paints, and they both commented on how much they loved them. They liked that the colours were vivid and vibrant and suggested I make more. I didn’t need much encouragement as I had enjoyed the process so much and so it began! Before I knew it, I had joined the Pigment & Dyers Association, read every book and resource I could get my hands on about pigments, mica’s and oxides, had done a course in watercolour painting, a watercolour workshop and I had made more paint than myself or my daughters could use in a lifetime.”
Vision
The next venture for Sisters’ Ink is tattoo inks. With serious concerns over the safety of coloured ink in the EU and global restrictions, it is ‘the sisters’ ambition to create a colourful range of safe and stable tattoo inks for the Australian tattoo industry. Initial product formulations have begun and the next phase will be chemical analysis and efficacy testing.
Watch this space!
