How Ink Is Made

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Ain't necessarily so (other than the protection thing). While you've described iron gall ink nicely, india ink (lampblack suspended in dilute shellac) would be a paint under your definition, as would many printers' inks (pigments ground into an oil or polymer binder), especially those used for serigraphy. Soaking in isn't necessarily a characteristic of inks either; they are often brittle films (which is why palimpsests exist—old ink was merely scraped off of the parchment/vellum and the ground reused). By the same token, watercolours (which are pretty much universally regarded as paints) do soak into unsized papers.

This is another one of those "where do you draw the line" questions where the line is rather broad and ill-defined. It's a continuum. When it comes right down to it, the intended purpose and traditional usage in the field determine what is an ink, what is a paint and what is a stain.

Yes, that is industrial ink, to print packaging mostly.

The ink there is probably custom made, you send the factory the material that you want to print on, and the moustached dude (the guy that is very fast with two spatula) will figure how to get the colours the designer wants on the material, and then they make the ink needed to mass printing on that material.

I've made a arcade machine once: http://tinyurl.com/cnv4h88 it took very hard work to get the colours right on the cabinet (and they actually, are still not right! they are just "acceptable" and I had ran out of money to do more experiments).

Each material reacts very differently to ink and paint (the arcade cabinet is partly painted, partly printed), and the results vary a lot without testing.

Note on the video how he says that after some testing, they add wax for example, this is a important part to make the ink reach some sort of desired effect on the material, maybe the material is think and will be crumpled (like candy wrapping or a t-shirt), then you need a very thin ink, that will not break, or a thick but flexible ink, that will stretch out as needed before breaking. But you might want to print on a very hard material (for example a plastic marquee) then you might prefer a ink that sticks very well on the material (try printing on metal...) and that is resilient (what happens if someone throw a rock on your road sign?)

I always has been a coder, but I would never figure when I went to design school (I am bachelor in design now) that I would find it fun :)

That's correct. You can find this sort of ink in squat little tins in the right art supplies store, if you ever wanted to do any printmaking yourself. (A local arts institution may offer courses in intaglio or letterpress. You also get to use some really nice paper.)

No problem. It's amazing how much of the process was done by hand.

If anyone is in San Francisco, I highly recommend The Center For The Book for their weeklong course on letterpress.

Then you tell the computer that that ink reservoir has now a particular color you ordered?

Curious how you tell a computer some colors are to be achieved by the regular process (like any inkjets) and others should come from the "specific paint reservoir for that color"