I’ve seen this fun questionnaire going around (thanks Olive Octopus) and thought I would give it a go. While inks are really fun and interesting, they aren’t something I spend too much time thinking about, so this was a fun exercise for me!
1. What was your first (memorable) ink?
Is it bad that my first memorable ink is also my first ink? Pilot Iroshizuku Ku-Jaku was the first ink I ever wanted. I love teals and Ku-Jaku has never disappointed me.
2. What is your favorite ink bottle design, and which bottle (or cartridge) is your favorite to use?
I can’t say I have a particular favorite, mostly because it’s a hefty tie between the older Sailor Jentle/Bungubox bottles in their little rounded pots and the bottles used by Birmingham Pen Co. I prefer bottles to have wide mouths to them so they’re easier to fill. I have a bottle from Akkerman, which is without a doubt one of the prettiest bottles I have, but I can’t say I use the ink enough to comment on it. I also really like the bulb design of the bottles used by Dominant Industries.
3. What is an ink you love or find useful, but would not use for everyday writing?
Once upon a time I had some Sailor Manyo Sakura, beautiful color, but it was just so light. Sailor Manyo Haha, Sailor Studio 123, and those other pastel duo-shade colors are so beautiful, but I am usually using a fine or extra fine nib, and those colors just do not fair well in those fine nibs. While I do have broader nibs, I just don’t reach for them too often unless I’m purposely trying to use up ink I would otherwise not be able to use. Which reminds me, I need to ink up something with Sailor Yurameku Amamoyoi and get it out of my samples…
4. How do you discover new inks?
I’m usually pretty late to the ink discovery party, but otherwise, it’s whatever comes across my Instagram feed these days. I get newsletters from pen shops, and I poke through the sample tables at pen shows, but in general, I’m behind the curve in inks, haha. I used to be more on top of it via podcasts and even Reddit, but it seems with the menagerie of things going on with social media these days, it’s gotten harder to get news from these forums.
5. Do you use inks for anything other than writing?
Sadly, no. It’s something I want to change in 2024, but it’s one of those things where, because I’m not entirely sure what I do want to try, I am in massive decision paralysis. I love seeing what people paint with their inks, I just need more confidence in myself to mess up. I have done a few small zentangles which I’m particularly bored!
6. What’s an ink that’s worth hoarding (whether you actually do or not)?
Honestly, Whatever ink makes you happiest. Which is really hard to define, especially when there are just a constant barrage of new inks coming out all the time. I’ve reached a point where I try to use my ink samples as soon as I can, and if I like the ink enough, I’ll get a bottle. However, I’ve yet to have an ink that has made me go, “OMG, yes, this is the INK!” though I’ve had a lot of inks that have delighted me to no end. I also don’t go through a lot of ink, so hoarding doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
7. How do you choose which ink goes into a pen? Do they have to match? Do you always use the same ink in a particular pen?
I usually go in reverse, I pick an ink I want to use and then pick a pen. I usually pick inks based on either the time of year or based on what I had inked the previous month. If I had a lot of warmer tones in one month, I usually gravitate to cooler ones the next. I do like either matching, or complementing the ink color to the pen color, but sometimes that just doesn’t happen (looking at you PenAddict x Opus 88 with Pilot Shin Ryoku. Translucent orange pen with green isn’t exactly pleasing to look at…). I only have one pen which has a specific ink for it, which is my Mita Club x Sailor Shooting Star of Jonuma.
Bottom: Pen Addict x Opus 88 Halo with Pilot Iroshizuku Shin-Ryoku
8. Do you use ink samples? If so, is your goal to find an ink to buy a bottle, or just get a smaller amount of ink to use?
Yes to all the things. Most of my inks are samples. According to The FountainPenCompanion, I have 75 bottles (the bulk of which are from Diamine Inkvent calendars) and 135 samples, and I’ve archived (which means I’ve either used or sold) 40 bottles (again, inkvent) and 33 samples.
Though, do be honest, I don’t usually get samples for the specific reason of getting bottles of ink. But I rarely buy bottles of ink without first getting a sample if possible. Plus, a sample of ink is generally good for two or three converter’s worth of writing, and a converter might last me a month. Yes, I really do that little writing…
9. Is there a popular ink that’s just not for you? What underhyped ink would you like to see more people try?
Does it have shimmer? I probably don’t like it. I want to like shimmer, but I have nothing but poor results when I use them so. Yeah. I also don’t really feel much love to Pilot Yama-Budo. It’s a nice color, flows well, appreciate the subtle sheen, but it’s not a color that really grabs me.
Considering I have no idea what is hyped these days… I think of Sailor Shikiori Waka-uguiu or Sailor Shikiori Tokiwa-matsu, both of which are earthy tea colored inks. I’m all for bright and poppy colors, but I also really like colors that are kind of muddy or earthy in a way.
10. What do you do with any unused ink when you clean a pen?
These days I pretty well try to write a pen either dry, or almost dry before I clean it, but if I do still have ink left, it goes down the drain. It feels like a waste, but I mega-hesitate to put ink back into something, a sample, maybe, but a bottle? No way.
But this really doesn’t happen to often, and if I’m at a point where I’m dumping ink, I probably didn’t like the ink much to begin with.
11. What is the most unique ink you’ve used or seen?
Kind of all the Sailor Yurameku inks are pretty out there. Dategokoro is an ink that goes down blue, but then kind of turns this reddish-purple? And apparently what color the ink turns is also based on the PH of the paper or something like that? So it’s a very different experince depending on what you are writing on. The swatch I have is blue, red, and purple, but It looked red when I used it on crappy paper at work, but it’s fairly blue in my Odyssey Notebook with Tomoe River paper.
I don’t think the Yurameku inks get the attention they deserve, because they are WILD.
12. How do you catalog, swatch, track, and store your inks?
Catalog: At the moment I use FountainPenCompanion, Col-o-Ring cards and am slowly building a Col-o-Dex. The Col-o-Ring cards are in order of brand then color, which the Col-o-Dex will by in order of color only. Sometimes a person just needs options.
Swatching: I was using a paintbrush, but I think I lost it at some point so I’ve been using q-tips and a Fine Sailor Hocoro dip nib.
Track: Aside from the FountainPenCompanion, I wanted to keep better track of my inks in my journal and so now I have a “Inks of the Month” section at the start of each month. If I ink a pen and use it in my journal, it gets added to the list.
Store: Samples are organized by brand and by color in those little test tube holder things. Bottles are sometimes kept in their boxes, but all of my inks are kept in a drawer so they don’t see any sunlight, or see very little.
13. What is your favorite ink color/color family?
Earthy tones for sure. Which is kind of hilarious because I don’t reach for them that often… I want to try all the things! But I do prefer inks with shading more so than anything.
14. What ink-related tool or accessory can you not live without?
Honestly… blunt end syringes. I have THE WORST time trying to fill from a sample vial. To the point where if I can’t take the pen apart in some way (piston fillers), I just won’t use that pen with sample inks. I sometimes think there must be some trick I just can’t figure out.
Plus they come in handy when it’s time to clean pens in flushing out ink from converters, and sometimes the nipple on the feed will fit into the syringe, making cleaning the feed even easier (SchonDsgn has made Luer’s specific to some brand’s feed and they are fantastic).
15. Have you ever mixed inks or used shimmer additives?
In a workshop at the 2023 DC Pen show, but that’s the only time. Or I’ve oops a mix up because I thought a pen was clean, but it wasn’t as clean as I thought. Ruined a complete fill of Birmingham Teaberry doing that (and on further inspection, I think I ruined the whole bottle…). I love the ink normally (and when I tried it in a different pen I had no issues) but it got mixed with some blue or something and it feathered, the color was off… it is a whole thing.
Not all inks can be mixed. Usually within a brand you’re okay, or there are brands which have created CMYK (K being Key, which is Black) and transparent/white inks which are to be mixed. There’s quite a few brands which have stepped into the “Make you own” realm.
I have some shimmer additive, but I don’t like shimmer so… not sure what I’ll do with it.
16. What is your favorite ink delivery system (cartridges, converters, other types of filling systems)?
At the end of the day… converters. They don’t hold a lot of ink, and some brands are worse than others both for how much they hold and the ease of filling (hence the blunt end syringes), but they’re easy to use. Push the ink down a little to help prime the feed faster, easy to remove and clean, never hold so much ink that you’re committed to weeks or months of the same color…
I like pistons from a self-contained aspect, but they don’t do anything for me really. I’ve never tried a vacumatic. Eyedropper is fine, but you run into similar issues with pistons of massive capacity, and unlike pistons or converters, there’s no way to quickly prime a feed. You just have to let gravity do it’s thing.
Really though, all I ask for is an ink window. I appreciate ink windows so much. Or demonstrator pens. Either works.
17. What ink(s) are you excited about right now?
Hmmm… I can’t really say there are any inks in my personal collection that I’m really wild about right at the moment, which isn’t to say there aren’t inks that I’m very interested in…
- KWZ Grapefruit
- Akkerman 28 Hofkwartier Groen
- Troublemaker Foxglove
- Octopus Fluid Inks (in general)
- Platinum Carbon Black
Probably the top five inks that I would say I’m the most interested in at this time, which isn’t to say there aren’t tons of inks that I would probably like, these are just the ones kind of at the top of my list. And yes, one of them is a basic black.
Whew! That was a lot! Of any aspect of fountain pens, I think ink is the biggest draw in the hobby. I mean there’s thousands of inks, some very similar to others, and some wildly out there. Some expensive, some cheap. There’s an ink out there for everyone really.
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