01 . 22

paper tiger : january ‘22

Thomas Little writes: “Paper Tiger is a blend of synthesized yellow iron oxide derived from an early 20th century shotgun manufactured by the Crescent Firearms Company, and an iron rich sandstone outcropping in the Cohairie River basin.  I named it Paper Tiger for its tawny hue and as a nod to the metaphor.  In transmuting the weapon to golden dust and symbolically returning it to the earth, the tiger loses his teeth and claws, and becomes just a shade, a suggestion of itself.”

***A note from Thomas Little and Tilke Elkins: Paper Tiger has a fairly high silica content, from the yellow ochre rock that was combined with the iron oxide from the gun. Some ochres are like this — they have an extremely fine iron oxide powder that’s brilliant hued and exists between the silica aggregates in the material. The pigment makes a nice deep ochre-brown paint with a large particle size texture just as it is, when used thick. Thinned, or mixed with a little white, it looks much yellower. If you’d like a finer, brighter pigment, we recommend you levigate Paper Tiger using the instructions on the Suggested Activity card. We’ve included a little more pigment that usual in this packet, to account for the extra silica. We hope you enjoy its many dynamic properties!

contributor: Thomas Little

Thomas is an amateur ink historian who explores mystic and scientific concepts through the lens of ink and our relationship to mark-making.  He gathers threads from alchemical imagery, chemical phenomena, and mystic observations, and incorporates them into a holistic synthesis theory of art-science-magic.  The natural world informs his work with ink in not only the materials used, but the relationships expressed between plant, animal, and elements.  He has formulated inks for people using some herbal requests and symbolic iron objects.  He is currently developing a primary palette with iron pigments derived from gun parts, and collaborating with a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum.