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Pelikan Edelstein Garnet In 2011 Pelikan introduced the Edelstein series of high-end inks, available in a variety of colours. The theme of the Edelstein concept is the gemstone – each ink corresponds to the beautiful colour of a gem. The Edelstein line of inks is presented in 50 ml high-value bottles, that are truly beautiful, and worthy of a place on your desk. In this review I take a closer look at Garnet, the Edelstein Ink of the Year 2014, which is now part of the regular Edelstein line-up. Garnet is a fairly bright and well-saturated orange-leaning red. In daylight and in scans the ink’s red tones dominate, but under warm artificial light Garnet definitely shows its orange-leaning nature. This is a decent red ink, that works well in all nib-sizes and on all types of paper. But that’s about it… personally I think there are lots of similar reds about, and there is little to lift Garnet above the pack. Below I give you enough background information to let you make up your own mind. The chromatography shows orange-red dyes and a bit of grey in the mix. The grey tones down the ink a bit, making Garnet appear less vibrant. For red inks, this can be a good thing: a full page of vibrant red might be a bit too much for some. From the bottom part of the chroma, you can already deduce that Garnet is not a water resistant ink. This Edelstein ink can handle all nib sizes with ease, always showing a well-saturated line. I actually prefer this ink with the finer nibs (EF/F), where its presence on the paper is less overwhelming. My personal opinion is that red inks are ok for occasional notes when reviewing/correcting a document, but are too loud for regular writing/journaling. A full page of Garnet hurts the eyes. 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 scrap of Tomoe River paper with ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range. Garnet has a low dynamic range, with little difference between the light and darker parts. Not a lot of shading with this ink! The little shading you get is most apparent when using Garnet in dry pens with broader nibs (like the 1.5 / 1.9 calligraphy nibs for a Lamy Safari). 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 fountain pen The name of the paper used, written with a B-nib Lamy Safari A small text sample, written with an M-nib Lamy Safari Origin of the quote, written with an F-nib Pelikan M101N Bright Red Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Lamy) The ink copes well with a wide variety of paper – it even works well with Moleskine paper: just a tiny bit of feathering, and only a bit of bleed-through. This is an ink that can tolerate even crappy copier paper at the office. I like Garnet just a touch more on the yellow papers in my test set. The yellow background accentuates the orange undertones of the ink, and reduces the contrast between ink and paper, making a page of red writing less loud and in your face. Scanned images alone are not enough to give you a good view of the ink - they tend to exaggerate contrast, and sometimes have difficulty capturing the colour of an ink. I’ve therefore added a few photos to give you another view on the ink. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. As you can see, Garnet works well in all nib sizes, even the finest ones. I actually prefer using it with the EF/F nibs – the fine line you get tames the ink a bit, and makes a full page of Garnet look a little more palatable. Related inks To show off 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 form. This allows you to easily compare the ink with its eight direct neighbours, which I hope will be useful to you. Garnet sits somewhere between MB Corn Poppy Red (which is a bit more vibrant) and kyo-iro Flaming Red of Fushimi (which looks a bit softer and more delicate). Inkxperiment – stilt village I’ve put myself a challenge to try to produce interesting drawings using only the ink I’m reviewing. For me this is an incredibly fun extension of the hobby, that continuously challenges my drawing skills. Red inks often have a low dynamic range, and are a real challenge for single-ink drawings, and Garnet is no exception. I therefore decided on a simple pen drawing. I started with an A4 piece of HP photo paper, on which I painted the background using a water-soaked kitchen towel on top of which I painted with water-diluted Garnet. This always produces a nicely textured background on which to paint the subject. In retrospect, I should have diluted the ink quite a bit more… the background turned out to be a bit too prominent. I then drew in the village buildings using a 2-point perspective, and added the stilts and netting with my Lamy Safari fountain pen. Final touches to the buildings were done with a felt-tip pen and fountain pen. The resulting drawing shows what can be achieved with Garnet in an artistic context. Due to its limited colour span, Garnet is best used for line drawings. The stilt village turned out quite well. A pity about the background that should have been softer… well, lesson learned for a next time 😉 Conclusion This Edelstein ink of the year 2014 (which is now part of the regular line-up) has no real technical shortcomings: well-saturated, works with all nib-sizes and paper types. It does lack water resistance though, if you care about such things. All in all a decent red, but personally I’ve seen better ones that I liked more. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Back-side of writing samples on different paper types

I was frustrated on a pen I bought: a Stipula Etruria Gallicana in Oronero color with a stiflexnib. This pen was gorgeous at first sight, but some drawbacks refrained me from using it daily: -It could only hold a small amount of ink: it is a CC filler. -The feed was a disaster as it was not suitable for a flex nib like the stiflex nib. -The pen was made of acrylic and i love the warm feeling of ebonite. After months of drawing plans and attempting on making parts for the pen I finally succeeded! This pen is made from ebonite rods from Nikko ebonite in ripple orange. The filling system is a Vac-Fill, a copy of the Wahl-Eversharp Doric second generation filling system. The cap doesn't post. The clip is sculpted from solid 316L stainless steel. Cap jewel and end barrel jewel are made of a gem grade rhodolite garnet embedded in 316L stainless steel. The cap ring is made of a solid rod of 316L stainless steel, engraved by hand with carbide tipped burr, with an artificially rusted finish. The nib is an original 14k Stiflex nig from Globus (Stipula) and is quite a wet noodle. The feed is in hard rubber from a destroyed Omas 360. Here are the pictures, it is now my daily writer!

I have a bunch of Monteverde inks purchased and as of yet untested, so on a whim I inked up my Pilot Kakuno with it. To my surprise, I actually got my Con-70 to fill up properly (this is only the second time I've ever used it)! I got so excited I wrote another 5 page review. I kept the scans messy because I didn't colour correct anything and I find leaving in the edges and bookmarks and stuff helps a little bit with the automatic colour correction. There's no pictures at this time because I have no light! We will see what tomorrow brings to the potato camera. Which is not much because they said it's going to be 37 degrees Celcius. Yeah, maybe we can test if ink can melt under direct sunlight, or if notebooks can spontaneously combust. Or not. Anyway here it is, let me know if you have any questions or just want me to stop posting these, for the love of god, enkida, stop posting already nobody thinks it's funny except you

This box set had the delicious idea to be waiting for me under the Christmas tree! I don’t think I saw a review of the whole set or of all of these here so I thought I’d take a quick shot at it (sorry no lovely splash or real water test). The Gemstone set comes in a cardboard box that closes with a magnet. Fairly common for ink sets; no overwhelming, exclusive package, not much wow… Each ink comes in the standard 30ml bottle and plastic wrapping Now for the inks: (dipped pens, Tomoe River paper. Picture taken around a week after it was made) We’ll (almost) follow the order of the bottles in the box (only bringing Amethyst from right to left, with its fellow cold hues). So we start with Sapphire and Charoite, a dark royal blue and a blue purple. Nice, bright colours, nothing wrong to say about these inks, but just not really my kind of colours. I guess I’ll leave further comments and comparisons to blue and purple lovers. Amethyst is more for me; It’s another purple, but a little more pinkish and lighter than Charoite. It seems to be made of bright pink and bright blue stuff trying to run away from each other at every opportunity. There is definitely something lavender in Amethyst, but unlike other ‘lavender’ inks, it does not fade or lean towards grey. I like it Notes: - I struggled with taking a decent photo of the purples. This is as close as I got to the real thing. - There IS a small difference between Charoite and Amethyst, I swear. But; enough to justify having both in the same set? - I saw photos of Sapphire, Charoite and Amethyst showing sheen. I didn’t hunt for it here and didn’t get any yet. In Olivine there is ‘olive’, but while some ‘olive’ inks shade from neon yellow/green to dark khaki, sometimes looking like actual olive oil or even borderline radioactive, Olivine is a more composed, slightly muted army green. An olive-ish ink without the drama. (even if I do like some drama in my inks. See: FireOpal). Olivine still has nice shading: Erinite is an interesting colour, and I have to say I had fun using it. It’s a bright green, but it feels different, not just another green. It must be a little more yellow or more blue than just green, maybe like a ‘reverse turquoise’ (as in a green with a drop of blue). I don’t know enough inks to claim it’s unique, but whatever it does, it does it well, it’s fresh, and to me it would make a great spring ink. I would probably call Topaz a medium, balanced orange; not overly red or yellow, not too light when writing (disclaimer: dipped. I have not tried it in a pen yet), not too bright or hard on the eyes either. I find it rather nice –a bit subdued - and probably easily usable. I don’t have other oranges to compare with and not a lot more to say about it (paging HalloweenHJB) It’s easy to see why Fireopal is the ink that got the most buzz in this series. I guess my only comment could be that; An ink that goes that much distance (between dark red to bright orange) in just one touch of a nib or brush - no special effect, no dilution, no artsy touch – an ink which has not just a lovely colour but several lovely colours in it and which does THAT SHADING is a winner, a queen in my books. It seems to look fairly similar to Diamine Ancient Copper in some pictures found online, but I don’t have that one. I nicknamed FireOpal ‘Liquid Fire’ I love it. I think it goes straight into my top 5 fave inks. I want to buy litres, gallons, tankers of it. (that was childish) Zoom (did I mention the shading?) Ruby is a deep, slightly dark red, not eye searing. Another rich colour in which you can find some reddish orange and some cherry red. I wouldn’t call this one a pure red, but I’m not one who’ll have lots of red inks, so this one may be my main if not only red for a while. Garnet is in that sweet Yama Budo/Magenta/ grapey/ fuchsia spot – or whatever that colour is actually called. It’s slightly reddish than YB. The comparison below will make more sense than words. I think I still prefer Yama Budo but Garnet is certainly very nice. I’m not a connoisseur of black inks, and can only compare Onyx to the few blacks I have. It’s the blackest of my blacks, and still looks pretty ‘neutral’ (as in not overly blue or purple) when diluted. My new favourite among my very few blacks. To sum up; a really nice set of inks. Nothing wrong to flag in terms of any ink overly fading, being dry or watery. We all love/ dislike different colours, so I'll just note that the set covers quite a broad array; there should be something for everyone in there. I would have loved to get Emerald and Moonstone in that set – instead of having 2 quite similar purples for example. So I will try to get them.

Today I tried my new bottle of Pelikan Edelstein Garnet for the first time. This was given to me by my older brother as part of a trade, and the only direction I gave him was that I wanted a red ink, since I didn’t have a bottle of red in my herd already. This is not my favorite shade of red, but it is an otherwise very pleasant ink to use. It has good flow and seems to be well behaved on the paper I used, which is a 24 lb inkjet paper but not overly special, like Rhodia or something. Something that it does not have is a good water resistance, though it’s very difficult to find a red ink that does (if I need water resistant red, I’ll stick to something like a Pilot Juice). So, what’s my final verdict? I enjoy this ink and I’m glad to have it in my collection, but I would not buy this ink for myself. It’s a bit too pricey for what is essentially just a red ink without any special properties. I would probably go for something in the Diamine line since you get more ink for less money without losing any features (except for the pretty bottle) and then you have more options to pick exactly what shade of red you prefer. This ink was given to me as a gift and I am not being compensated for this review in any way. All opinions above are my own and you are free to disagree if you like. See the full page review here.

I'm planning on purchasing a Cross Townsend fountain pen, but I can't seem to make up my mind on the finish. I'm considering the following: Quartz Blue LacquerGarnetRuby Lacquer​Opinions are more than welcome. Any information regarding your experience with a Townsend is appreciated. I would love to see a writing sample for the fine and medium nib (two-tone 18-karat/rhodium-plated). Thanks in advance.

I'm new to the forum and in need of desperate help. I'm an artist and I have sold some commissioned work for Christmas involving the Florida State University (FSU) logo and I'm having a hard time finding an ink to match it. I read in a post on here back in 2011 or 2013, I can't remember, about somebody liking Private Reserve Fiesta Red as a match to the Garnet color in their logo. Has anybody else used this ink? Or does anybody have any suggestions for an ink that would match the garnet for FSU? I will be mainly doing line work, but I'd prefer a smooth ink that doesn't have variations in color. If I can't figure out any other colors, I'm just going to order the PR Fiesta Red and hope for the best. At $10 a bottle, usually, I can't afford to buy oodles of ink to try. The amount of reds are endless so I'd go broke. Thanks for the help!