Water resistance testing of two popular blue inks

"without a trace" is a good tag for this image! I suppose this is a good sign for folks who have their pens leak in their pockets, but for my uses these results are a bit disappointing, especially since it has been reported that Horizon Blue has some water resistance. Do you recall how long the inks were dry before soaking?

12 minutes ago, AmericanMonk said:

Do you recall how long the inks were dry before soaking?

 

I’m sure I recorded it somewhere… right there in the corner of the image.

20 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

I’m sure I recorded it somewhere… right there in the corner of the image.

If I'm reading that correctly the page was soaked in water for 24 hours. I'm asking how long the ink had been allowed to dry prior to being soaked.

Very well. I apologise for my misunderstanding and having dismissed your question so hastily. Thank you for showing patience with me in spite of my apparent rudeness.

 

It's a fair enough question, but one that I almost never look into — except when it comes to iron-gall inks, which are commonly understood to darken over time after being laid on the page (but before the dyestuff colourants fade), and thus obviously requiring time to ‘cure’ — because, to me, water resistance of ink ought to manifest as soon as one has finished writing a word. Nano-pigment inks suitable for fountain pens work so, as do many Noodler's inks (I find X-Feather Blue to be excellent, even though I'm no fan of the brand or its founder) and any number of ‘common’ black inks, grey inks, and so on.

 

So, at best I could only say whether the sheet was dunked several minutes after I was done writing on it into a bath, or that it was left at least overnight and only drowned the next day as an afterthought while cleaning things off my desk.

 

I'm not exactly sure in this case. The torn top edge suggests to me that it was a test sheet I'd screwed up inadvertently, and ripped off the Rhodia notepad in a huff, so I most likely have left it ‘overnight’, which could have been anywhere from four hours to sixteen hours.

 

To make amends, I'll do another test sheet with those blue inks, and write on it at different times of the day (marking the times down using waterproof fineliner), and then drown the sheet at the end of the day, just to see whether a few hours after the ink drying makes a difference. (I don't believe an ink should be allowed any more than 60–90 seconds to dry, i.e. for all the solvents to have evaporated, irrespective of any chemical reaction between the colourants and the paper.) I'll report back in a couple of days.

 

So it appears that time to ‘cure’ once the ink has been laid (and dried) on the page, up to 15 hours, does not increase the water resistance for these inks.

Thankyou for making that experiment and reporting the result - it's very useful and not something I had thought to test so definitively. Your test design is as helpful as the result for this particular ink. My own testing was more along the line of 'oops not ready for the watercolour yet'.