Pen And Ink Filling Rules - How Do You Choose Ink / Pen Combinations?

[amberleadavis]

At THE LAS VEGAS PEN POSSE, we have discussed the "rules" we each have for choosing which ink belongs in which pen.

 

One of my fellow TLVPP has always had the most elaborate guidelines .... I'm sure he'll jump in and correct my misunderstandings ....

 

1. Match brand of pen with brand of ink ... Pelikan ink goes in Pelikan pens.
2. Match color of ink with barrel of pen ... Pelikan Amber ink goes in the Pelikan Tortoise.
3. When you cannot meet Rule 1, then choose by country....
   1. German inks can go in a German Pen ... So MB ink can go in a Pelikan Pen.
   2. If you can't match by country, then try and match by continent or trade zone. So if you count MB is Austrian not German, it can still go in a Pelikan pen.
   3. BUT try and follow the WWII Axis / Allied alliances....
      1. Herbin ink does not go into Aurora pens
   4. AND keep the war theaters differentiated....
      1. Sailor ink does not go in Pelikan pens. Pelikan ink does not go into Sailor Pens.

Now, I would have said that I don't have any hard and fast rules, but I've recently been proven wrong. My beloved teenage daughter had an opportunity to flirt with a cute teenage boy. I'm a good mommy, I made the opportunity available to them and compensated them for their efforts. They were tasked with the "fun" job of refilling all my already clean fountain pens. I picked out the colors and had them fill while I was in a meeting. Much to my surprise, strange inks ended up in my pens. Well, not strange so much as unexpected. Seems I had some rules that I had not articulated.

 

So, most of my pens are TWSBIs so my ink selection process should be simpler than Xxxxx's, right?

 

1. Never mix inks in the original bottles. If you dip the pen in, only use that ink.
2. If it's a Vac 700, then it should be filled with one of the inks from the Vac 20 bottle.
   1. Except the Amber Vac - gets Pelikan Amber ink.
3. The ROC should only get Red or Blue Ink.
4. The Gold Sheaffer ladies calligraphy pen always gets some sort of leafy green ink.
5. The 540 with the Pendleton Nib always gets a great shader in blue or green.
6. The Yellow 540s get orange, red or yellow inks.
7. The Smoke 540s get dark colors (Sherwood Green, Deep Burgundy, Dark Purple).
8. The Blue 540s and Blue Pelikan get blue inks.
9. The Namiki capless gets J Herbin Anniversary ink.

So, at the end of the adventure ...

1. Noodler's Catalpa was the only fatality - they both ended up covered in the ink, but neither of them had the fingerprints of the other party, so they both lived.
2. Neither teenager could figure out how to fill the Vacs.
3. The ROC ended up with Liberty Elysium (only because I stopped them from a dreadful fill of PR Avocado ... the horror!)
4. The Gold Sheaffer was filled with Levenger Amethyst. (I didn't remember giving them that bottle).
5. The 540 with the Pendleton nib ended up filled with MB racing green.
6. The blue 540s ended up with Dragon's Napalm, Edelstein Amber and Diamine Syrah. (red / gold colors)
7. The yellow 540s ended up with Manhattan Blue, a Pilot Iro blue/turquoise and Catalpa (bluish inks)
8. The smoke 540s ened up with the Herbin Ann Ink, PR Avocado and the blue Pelikan M200 was filled with MB Diamond.
9. The Namiki was filled with my beloved bloody orange.

As you can imagine, I was so confused when I went to doodle.

 

So, what are your rules for loading up your pens with inks?

 

 

[Charles Skinner]

I try to keep pens with certain ink very, very close to the actual bottle, even right beside the bottle.

 

C. S.

[JakobS]

My ink and pen decisions are pretty simple..." I want to try this ink, now where's an empty pen?!!"

 

Okay recently it has been " I want to see this ink shade, now where's a good italic, or oblique nib?"

 

My favorite inks are Diamine, my favorite pens are Esterbrook, so I prefer my pens and inks to intermingle. If colors match it is generally unintentional.

 

Generally, I start out with wanting to use a certain pen, and the consider what ink I am in the mood to use, I've tended towards medium nibs recently so rarely do I consider what the ink may look like with a given nib, they all are satisfactory!

[Plume145]

I sometimes have a tendency to overcomplicate things for myself by over-thinking things and creating too many rules, so on pens I've deliberately dodged this as much as I can (but that's just the way it works for me; not saying having rules is stupid or bad, just that you should only do it if it makes things more fun for you lol).

 

So I'm basically down to just a vague idea that I should make the colors match up (color-wise or with a theme), just to avoid eye-searing combos like fuchsia and orange or whatever. And that I should have a range of nib sizes - one should be this huge Luoshi calligraphy pen that's super-wide but with a pretty forgiving 'sweet spot' (unlike blunt cut nibs) so it's sort of my ersatz sharpie - good for larger letters like titles or a reminder in a page full of notes.

 

That's it pretty much. But if I went with rules, your friend's is definitely the way to do it right!

[zuerincolour]

I fill my favourite pen at the time with my favourite ink at the time. I think that works pretty well.

[colrehogan]

I find that I don't have too many rules. One is that I don't put Diamine Red Dragon back into my Pilot Custom 74 Demonstrator. My Namiki Chinese Phoenix pen has only seen black ink thus far. Because of its nib size (F) and the fact that it writes more like an XXF (!), I had yet to find an ink that flowed well in it. I just put some Iroshizuku take-sumi in it and it flows great! Aside from that, I don't have much in the way of "rules" for filling my other pens.

[Kuryaka]

I don't have enough pens to have strict filling rules. However... my fine nibbed pens (Hill pen, TWSBI 580) like better-flowing inks, and I like dark inks in them so I can actually see what I'm writing.

 

For my italic nibs (Sheaffer No-Nonsense and modded Varsity) I put whatever I'm in the mood for, as long as it's not the same ink I'm using in the fine-tipped pens. Which rarely happens.

 

As far as ink goes... I mix up a batch when I run out, alternating between a deep burgundy, dark green, golden brown, and blue-black for fine-nibbed pens. All Noodler's ink, with some kind of bulletproof mixed in just in case I get my chem notes wet.

 

I also have a little vial of Uni-Ball Vision Elite ink. I'd say this stuff is about as good as Noodler's Bulletproof, as it's advertised to be resistant to check washing. And it comes in every color of the rainbow besides yellow. It looks like a pigmented ink, but works fine in my pens.

It's fun to see this ink slowly sink into the paper - in a purple ink mix, I used some red Vision Elite ink. The ink looks reddish when wet but shifts toward purple as it dries.

It's pretty expensive for an ink though - I'm not sure how much I'm getting out of a gutted pen, but I don't need a lot of it to work as intended. Diluted to 1/15 or so (with assorted non-waterproof inks) and it's still visible after washing with alcohol.

[pankaj]

Life is complicated. No point to add more. Simple rule : ink of your choice in pen of your choice. If a mismatch which is providential, try another.

[lapis]

Life is complicated. No point to add more. Simple rule : ink of your choice in pen of your choice. If a mismatch which is providential, try another.

I couldn't have put it better. I have zero rules. If I and/or the pen don't like that ink, it won't work well, so we try another match. E.g. My M800 writes a bit dry, so we need wetter inks. Whether or not "Pelikan pens are dry" and/or "Pelikan inks are dry" -- so don't use those two together -- is actually always true or not, I just don't rely on that. Trying out 5-10-20 pairs, we've had good results, and I do document that (for myself). It's like relationships with man and woman, you know...

 

Mike

[queenofpens]

It happens entirely in my right brain - intuitive, emotional, and visual and with insufficient links to the part of my brain that analyzes verbally.

 

I am quite sure there are rules, but I can't describe them.

 

And even then, they sometimes get disrupted by the problem of "new ink sample, where's an empty pen" as mentioned by a previous poster.

 

Usually that is just an expedient and not an actual decision, so has no meaning for future fills of that pen.

[CAG_1787]

The demonstrators don't get inks that are known to stain.

 

The Pilot VPs never get the ink that shall not be named.

 

There's always at least one pen inked with Noodler's Black.

 

Beyond that, I don't have a hard and fast rule.

 

The most complex and sophisticated manner of handling this issue is found, I think, in FPN's own DaveyB (I think that's his name). The fellow created his own database program that automatically designates a pen and ink combination. That, in and of itself, is not that crazy, but he integrated a function into the program that gives every pen a sort of "robustness" factor, that prevents crazy inks (like BSB) from being put in pens that would be more likely to be harmed by them (demonstrators, vintages, etc).

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Ink color and barrel color close enough to each other that the barrel color implies the ink color.

 

Blue (Sheaffer or Pelikan) in the blue dome-top M200

Black in the black/charcoal dome-top M150

Red in the red demo crown-top M200

Green in the green crown-top M200

Brown in the Pirre Paul wood

Pelikan turquoise in the pale blue Wearever Pennant

Batteries in the MagLite.

[colrehogan]

Ink color and barrel color close enough to each other that the barrel color implies the ink color.

 

Blue (Sheaffer or Pelikan) in the blue dome-top M200

Black in the black/charcoal dome-top M150

Red in the red demo crown-top M200

Green in the green crown-top M200

Brown in the Pirre Paul wood

Pelikan turquoise in the pale blue Wearever Pennant

Batteries in the MagLite.

So, what color would you put into a white colored pen?

 

The majority of my pens are black, so I could easily do this rule! I need to update my ink database. I might have mostly black inks too!

[CharlieTurtle]

Red and purple are usually (though not always) filled with the same colour ink as their barrel (Not always because I wanted to write an entire essay in green to show a professor who though ink only came in blue and black...)

 

Parker Vector always has either blue or purple

 

Faber-Castell takes the leftover

[Uncle Red]

I've been trying to track the wetness of each pen and each ink so I can mate them this way. I don't want to put De Atramentis Aubergine in my Waterman 55 Ripple again, way too wet a combo.

[ever onward]

I go for pairings that are (IMO) harmonious. For some pens that means I'm strictly limited: green ink for green pens, purple ink for purple pens. My beautiful sterling and swirly-gray resin Montegrappa Privilege gets only the gray spectrum of inks. (I tried purple once and had to rinse it out. )

 

But for, say, a yellow pen, I can use yellow or orange or brown. Black pens can have anything but darkish blue*--light blues & turquoises are okay. White, gold, and silver pens are fab because the ink options are wide open.

 

Hm. I intended to write only the 'harmonious' sentence, but caveats kept popping into my mind. I guess I do have rules.

 

,

eo

 

* I finally caved and bought a couple 'real' blues.

Edited May 8, 2013 by ever onward

[amberleadavis]

Thank you, all. I'm enjoying this....

 

Mike -- if your women are that ??? then maybe you need a database too.

[lapis]

Thank you, all. I'm enjoying this....

 

Mike -- if your women are that ??? then maybe you need a database too.

Amber, I couldn't agree more with you. How cum, you knew that? They all (the three wives) do exist in a database of mine, and... until today... I still don't know which of those inks was the best (as re wetness, you know)... head turning red...

[WOBentley]

I don't have any hard and fast rules, but I have a few principles I use most of the time...

I'll use Waterman inks in almost anything.

Hard to clean pens (such as lever fillers except the Likes of Esterbrook which are easy to clean due to the removable nib) get easy to clean inks like Waterman.

Vintage pens don't get caustic or high maintenance inks

Demonstrators rarely get reds or violets due to staining worry...but honestly I have broken this one a LOT as those colors look so darn good in a demonstrator.

I lean to using Noodler's eel inks in my piston fillers...I like the lubricity and I do thing it seems to help with piston action...I break this rule frequently too...putting MB and Pelikan inks in my MB and Pelikan pens (interchangeably) at times.

 

I like to change ink colors frequently so I have become a fan of C/C pens as the volume is low-ish and I don't care of they get stained as they are usually easily replaced if it bothers me (which is essentially never!).

Oh...and I pay no attention to the color of ink in relation to the color of the pen...in fact I sort of like the "surprise" of an orange ink coming from a blue pen (as an example!)

 

Fun topic!

[hbquikcomjamesl]

So, what color would you put into a white colored pen?

 

I'd look for any spot of color (e.g., a cap jewel), the same as on an all-black pen. Osmiroid 65s were all black, with a black rivet holding the clip on the cap; on the one I put green ink in, I painted the rivet green.