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Terra Firma is one of Franklin Christoph's new "Special Colors". This is how they're described on the website: "These are our new inks. These are generally lubricated inks, with moderate shading and some sheening". If this is their version of 'moderate shading', I'd really like to see an ink that FC calls highly shading. More on that in a bit though. First things first: their bottle is very practical, with quite a wide neck. Their label is decent too; its nothing fancy but it certainly is not ugly like the Private Reserve bottles are. I did find it odd that it comes without a box- isn't keeping ink bottles exposed to sunlight supposed to harm inks? At any rate, the ink bottle lives at the back of my book shelf. The ink itself is beautiful. Like I said earlier, there really isn't anything 'moderate' about the shading. On Rhodia paper, it is very much there and visible. This is a really pretty reddish-brown colour that reminds me of the iron rich earth of my home town, and also brings to mind rainy afternoons spent on farms with coconut water . I'm incredibly fond of this shade. The ink is pretty well behaved. Dries on Rhodia in about 30 to 33 seconds. It has no resistance to water so even though it is relatively subdued, I would be hesitant to use it on anything that is important or that may be subjected to water spillage. Lubrication and flow are both good and the ink performs surprisingly well on cheap copy paper. No bleedthrough, only some showthrough, and very limited feathering. However, on leaving the pen uncapped, the ink dries out on the nib causing a bit of a hard start. It isn't anything major though, and it starts off again after about half a downstroke. It's also worth mentioning that in any nib finer than a Conklin Medium, the ink appears rather flat, showing none of its pretty shading. The ink comparison is more for hue comparison though on my monitor, the colours all appear true. More shading- these samples were written with the Namiki Falcon <SM> and you can see the greater shading even in the un-flexed portions. I really do love this ink, so there are a lot of photos in this review *sheepish smile*