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Part of the appeal of fountain pens is using specific inks to organize my thoughts, after quite some time I finally managed to group these colours by topics (business topics I won't bore you with). Some colours get along great with all the others, others are a lot more particular to my eye; there are many more combinations possible, but I didn't want to repeat colours in other groups. Each group has an anchor: Ajisai, Tsuyu Kusa, Vert Empire (missing in action), Ina Ho, Mandarin. There are two general purpose inks, Verdigris and Perle Noire (also momentarily orphaned).

Hey there community! For all you newer folks out there wondering about how Noodler's Ink's Bad Blue Heron works in a Pilot Metropolitan (F) and Lamy Al-Star (EF). Here's the story. YMMV. A while ago I made a posting asking about how to pair Noodler's Ink's Bad Blue Heron successfully with my Lamy Al-Stars (EF) and what nib replacement I should use. I was running into major flow and start issues at the time with the EF nibs; Bad Blue Heron would often dry on the nib and cause the pen to fail to start immediately upon touching paper, and the overall flow through the pen after I got it to write was intermittent at best. I was not amused. After asking this great community for advice and searching the forums I learned several things: 1. Bad Blue Heron is not a well behaved ink, and what I experienced was a common thing for some other people. It's a hit or miss when inking up pens with this ink. 2. The Jinhao X750 is a sufficiently cheap beater pen that can come completely apart for cleaning and replacing the nibs, and so is a perfect candidate for testing inks in. It comes in a #6 M nib (to my knowledge), so you can replace the nib to any other sizing (e.g. F) so long as it remains a #6 nib. 3. Noodler's Ink's Bulletproof Black seems to be well behaved in many pens. So what I did was flushed out my Lamy Al-Star using Bad Blue Heron and inked it up with Bulletproof Black and never looked back. Problems on the Lamy front solved. But as far as the Bad Blue Heron was concerned I didn't want to waste the bottle of ink so I contemplated ordering the Jinhao X750 to test it out in. However, with a perfectly good Pilot Metropolitan (F) lying around and my impatience getting the better of me, I inked up the Pilot Metropoitan (F) with Bad Blue Heron instead. I rolled the dice and I was rewarded (YMMV and do not try with expensive pens). It so happens that Noodler's Ink's Bad Blue Heron works very well in my Pilot Metropolitan (F)! Bad Blue Heron's behavior in the Pilot Metropolitan was akin to the proprietary Pilot inks that I initially bought with the pen. I've been using my Pilot Metropolitan (F) with Bad Blue Heron for the last three weeks and the ink's behavior is consistent and predictable. When I touch pen to paper (whether the paper is cheap and absorbant or glossy and smooth) the ink flows immediately. The line layed down by this pen and ink combination is crisp and well approximated in the less absorbant papers, and on very cheap absorbant paper (writing pads from Costco) it fuzzies up just a tad (but not enough to ruin your writing). And throughout your writing session, there is no discernable flow issues as you write page to page. As a caveat however I must admit that if you leave the pen uncapped for a good while, the ink will characteristically dry a bit on the nib. But even after purposely doing this, my Pilot Metropolitan (F) still began to write almost immediately after touching paper. Also, you will experience the same nib creep that you get in other pens with this particular set up as well. Otherwise, the Pilot Metropolitan (F) and Bad Blue Heron pairing has been a stable workhorse of mine now and will continue to stay that way into the foreseeable future. Let me know what your experiences are with this and other Noodler's Inks. And feel free to add any information you think pertinent. - Thanks for reading, MPenn TL; DR = The Pilot Metropolitan (F) and Bad Blue Heron combo works well and writes great! YMMV

I'm a biology student, and all my notes involve a bunch of illustrations, diagrams, labels etc. This semester I've been using two LAMYs with some stock standard LAMY blue ink and a bottle of Herbin's Cafe Des Iles. on it's own LAMY blue is boring as hell, I can certainly see a lot of use for it but it's by no means an exiting color. Cafe Des Iles on the other hand is like writing with rich, silty, honest dirt from a healthy creekbed. But I digress. The two inks play off against each other in a way I simply haven't ever seen before. Neither demands attention from each other, Both keep from being gaudy or overly contrasted, And I really like the look of it. SO, have any of you stumbled upon a pair of inks that play against each other in that perfect, hard to pinpoint way? what are your favourite pairs of inks?