Ink Drop: March 2012

I received my second Ink Drop shipment from Goulet Pens this weekend and it is full of sunny, springy bright colors! Included this month was Schaeffer Skrip Brown, Noodler’s Summer Tanager, Platinum Cyclamen Pink, Private Reserve Foam Green and Diamine Washable Blue.

To be honest, I am loving all of the colors and quite enjoy that this month’s samples are so widely different in color. Just when I want more color in my world, even my ink samples provide!

Also included was a vial of  J.B.’s Perfect Pen Flush to help clean ink residue from inside your pens. I haven’t tried the Pen Flush yet but I’ll let you know all about it when I do. I’ll put it to the test with one of my craggy vintage fountain pens to really see how it works!

I ran a quick swab of each color and then just scratched out some text with a dip nib just to see how the colors looked in actual writing. Again, I am using my Miquelrius grid notebook as a constant for all my samples. It is not overly fond of dip nibs (bleeds a lot!) but seems to hold up well to the same inks when used in an actual fountain pen.

To demonstrate, when I dipped into the Noodler’s Summer Tanager, it bled so badly as to be nearly illegible. When I put the same ink into my Lamy with a 1.1mm nib, there was no bleeding or feathering at all. So, the same inks can behave radically differently depending on the tool. The Private Reserve Foam Green and Diamine Washable Blue performed best in the dip pen with very little feathering on the paper so I suspect they will be excellent in my fountain pens.

And since I now have four different brown inks here I can compare, I added the Sheaffer Skrip Brown to my brown swabs.

The Sheaffer Skrip Brown is the lightest brown I have so far and the most terra cotta in color. In writing, it looks the most “brown” where the Havana Brown and Chocolat look more like a brown-black. (Pardon my spelling in the photo)