Since the clans cook with fire, I imagine they'd have plenty of soot laying around because of it. Do they ever use it for ink or dying "clothes" or is it just the stuff apprentices get stuck with cleaning at the end of the day for a moon when in trouble?
A bit of both! Soot can be combined with water to create Bistre. It's a brown pigment that works nicely for watercoloring.
Unfortunately, the best ""paper"" the clan cats have is parchment... but they don't do a lot of writing yet, nor do they have written history. And parchment doesn't take watercolors well, especially not the natural tones of bistre.
So bistre is seen as an apprentice material. It's sort of like crayon. You're not expected to draw great art with it, but it's easy to make and it's a chore to clean out the oven anyway, so you might as well have fun with the soot.
Whitestorm actually really loved bistre, much to his father's chagrin. He continued to draw with it into his warriorhood. His son, Sootfur, was named after it. Sootfur really loved this about his name, and it encouraged an interest in bistre drawings in turn.
He was an artsy guy, but unfortunately his life was cut tragically short. In death, he's twisted up about the unfairness of dying before he was able to paint the beautiful, exposed walls of the new ThunderClan camp.
