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TACCIA Ukiyo-e Hiroshige asahanada TACCIA is a Japanese stationery company, that - as far as I know - is now part of the Nakabayashi group. They offer high-quality fountain pens, inks, pen-rolls, notebooks, etc. More specifically, TACCIA produce a line of inks, inspired by the unique look of Ukiyo-e paintings from Japan’s Edo period (17th century). Ukiyo-e prints are woodblock prints where the work of an artist is carved into wood by woodworkers, and pressed onto paper by printers. This allows the production of multiple prints of an artwork with some different colours as well. In this review, I take a closer look at asahanada, a pale indigo-blue that is inspired by the painting “Dye House at Konya-cho” of the artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1857). In Hiroshige’s day, anybody who knew Edo could recognize the city’s three most prominent landmarks: distant Mount Fuji, Chiyoda Castle, and Nihon Bridge. This particular painting features both the castle and mountain, leaving no doubt that this is an Edo scene. Hiroshige positions the viewpoint for this drawing amid the windblown textiles of a dyer’s drying platform. This woodprint is part of the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Asahanada’s pale light-blue is modeled after the colour present on the banners. Asahanada is a soft pale blue, with a bit of a green undertone. The ink feels delicate, and caresses the paper with a soft line that exhibits beautiful shading. On its own, you might be reminded of a cerulean blue like iroshizuku kon-peki or Pelikan Edelstein Topaz, but this asahanada is a much softer ink that definitely stands on its own. This is not really an ink suited for the workplace, but I most certainly enjoyed using it while writing in my daily journal. Asahanada prefers wetter pens/nibs, where it looks at its best. With finer nibs in dry pens (like the Lamy Safari), the ink becomes a bit to pale with too little contrast with the paper. I quickly switched to wetter pens (Pelikan, Edison) to fully enjoy this ink. The ink comes in a 40 ml bottle, that is packaged in a beautiful box showing the corresponding Ukiyo-e painting. Lovely packaging for an excellent ink. To show you the impact of saturation on the ink’s look & feel on paper, I made some scribbles where I really saturated portions of a strip of 52 gsm Tomoe River paper with ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range. Asahanada has a fairly narrow dynamic range, ranging from a very soft indigo-blue to a more saturated almost sky-blue. The contrast between the light and dark parts is fairly low, which translates to beautiful soft shading. The shading appears in all nib sizes - just a hint with the EF nib, but really present with F-nibs and above. The aesthetics are superb, adding lots of character to your writing. The ink’s chromatography clearly shows the green undertones within the ink. These green dyes are very water-soluble, and will readily surface when using asahanada for drawing. The bottom part of the chroma also indicates that this is a fairly water-resistant ink, which is confirmed during water tests. TACCIA’s ink makers Hiroshi Ishiguro and Hanse Matsumoto know their craft, and created a beautiful soft ink with a relatively simple mix of dyes. I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. On every small band of paper I show you: An ink swab, made with a cotton Q-tip 1-2-3 pass swab, to show increasing saturation An ink scribble made with an M-nib Lamy Safari The name of the paper used, written with a B-nib Lamy Safari A small text sample, written with a Pelikan M101N with F-nib Source of the quote, written with an Edison Collier 1.1 stub Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the F-nib Pelikan) Asahanada looks gorgeous on pure white paper, where its shading and soft elegance really shine. I personally don’t like its look on more yellow/cream paper, where the ink gets a bit of a green tinge. The ink shows a tiny amount of feathering on lower quality paper, together with some show-through and bleed-through. Drying times with the F-nib Pelikan are in the 5 to 10 second range. I’ve also added a few photos to give you another view on the ink. Scanned images and photos often capture different aspects of the ink’s colour & contrast. That’s why I present them both. In this case, I find that the scans capture asahanada’s softness best – the photos make the ink look a bit too vibrant. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. The EF-nib already shows a hint of shading. But it is with the F-nib and above that the ink’s elegant shading really comes into play. Look e.g. at the shading with the Edison 1.1 stub – that’s why I use a fountain pen! I personally prefer to use this ink with the wetter pens (Pelikan, Edison), where the ink gets a bit more saturated while preserving its soft and delicate nature. Related inks To compare asahanada with related inks, I use my nine-grid format with the currently reviewed ink at the center. This format shows the name of related inks, a saturation sample, a 1-2-3 swab and a water resistance test – all in a very compact format. Among the inks I already used, I found nothing that compares to asahanada. But in my mind, it’s similar to the sky-blues (kon-peki, topaz) if you tone them down quite a bit. Inkxperiment – air elemental With every review, I try to create an inkxperiment using only the ink I am presenting. These one-ink drawings are great for showing the colour-range nuances that can be achieved with the ink. And it’s great fun to experiment with inks in a more artsy context – I love doing these inkxperiments, even if they don’t always come out the way I wished them to be. In previous reviews, I introduced the elements water, earth and fire. For this inkxperiment, the blue asahanada represents the element “air” in the form of an air elemental. HP photo paper usually brings out the best in inks, so I decided to use it for this drawing too. In retrospect, this was not the best choice. The green components of the ink really come to the front, and the delicacy of the pale indigo-blue has been lost. Watercolour paper might have been a better choice for this inkxperiment. Also, the air elemental didn’t come out the way I imagined… too clunky and certainly not airy enough. Well… inkxperiments are fun to do, even if they fail. And it’s from such failures that you learn. Based on this inky experiment, I would conclude that asahanada is best reserved for writing – where the component dyes get separated, the soft pale-indigo beauty of the ink gets lost. Conclusion TACCIA Ukiyo-e Hiroshige asahanada is a very fine writing ink – on pure white paper, this pale indigo-blue produces soft & elegant writing that is great for personal journaling. And with a wet pen, the ink exhibits some truly beautiful shading! The ink looks gorgeous with the right combination of pen/nib/paper – in this case: wet pens, broader nibs, pure white paper. Leave this sweet spot though, and the ink quickly loses its magic. You have been warned! Personally, I really enjoyed using TACCIA asahanada, and I’m looking forward to explore more inks of the TACCIA Ukiyo-e line. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Back-side of writing samples on different paper types