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Pelikan Edelstein Golden Lapis Ink of the Year 2024 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 the spotlight shines on the shimmering presence of Golden Lapis, the Edelstein Ink of the Year 2024. This is a limited edition glitter ink, that will most probably be gone in the near future. At heart, Golden Lapis is a bright light-blue ink with added golden shimmer particles. I’m not a fan of shine & shimmer, so will mostly ignore this aspect of the ink. Just one word of warning: the gold particles tend to accumulate at the surface, and will easily come off the paper when the ink has dried. It’s almost unavoidable. The ink’s colour is quite enjoyable. My first thought was: “Oh, this is Topaz with shimmer”. But that’s not really the case. Topaz is a lighter turquoise blue, while this Golden Lapis definitely is a touch darker. Still a light & bright blue though. Most Edelstein inks work well across the nib size range, and can handle all types of paper. This one is a bit more finicky. It mostly has problems with absorbent paper: the ink gets sucked right in and through the paper, with bleed-through as a result. Yikes! On hard-surface coated paper, the ink looks great, but it needs its time to dry… for a long time. In return, you get strong and truly nice shading, and a bit of a purple-reddish sheen. Overall, a good-looking ink with some technical issues. The chromatography shows a light-blue dye with some purple component in the mix that darkens up the ink a bit. Water resistance is fairly good: although a good deal of the dyes are washed away, enough is left to easily reconstruct your writing. Not bad. Golden Lapis writes well in all nib sizes. A nicely lubricated and well-saturated ink that always leaves a strong and contrast-rich line on the paper. I like it best with the broader nibs, where the shading really comes into play. I’m not usually a big fan of heavy shading, but for this ink I make an exception. Golden Lapis looks at its best when the shading is strongest – the contrast between light and darker parts is really well balanced, and looks just darn good. But you only get this lovely and aesthetically pleasing shading on the hard-surface paper. On absorbent paper, shading is just barely there and the ink loses much of its appeal. 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 piece 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. Golden Lapis has a medium colour span, gradually darkening as saturation increases, but always keeping true to its light-blue nature. The light-to-dark ratio in writing is just right, with really great aesthetics. You get prominent shading, not too extreme, which looks absolutely gorgeous – but only on the hard-surface paper. Technically, the ink has the typical Edelstein feel: well lubricated, good saturation. It’s a shame it doesn’t work well with absorbent paper, and that includes all types of copy paper. The ink then gets sucked into and through the paper, making a mess of the opposite side. For some reason, it also didn’t work well with the paper in my Paperblanks journal, which usually is not that fussy about the inks I use. Looks like the Paperblanks paper is just a touch too absorbent to work well with this ink. Below you’ll find photos of the writing samples on loads of different paper types. This should give you a good feel for the ink. On each scrap 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 Safari fountain pen The name of the paper used, written with a B-nib Safari A small text sample, written with the M-nib Safari Title of the quote, with a Pelikan M120 with M-nib Drying times of the ink on the paper, with the M-nib Lamy Safari I’ve also added a scan of some writing samples 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. The ink swabs look closest in colour in the scanned image. The character of writing shows best in the photos. Below you also find some blow-ups on coated paper to really show you that beautiful shading. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. The top samples were written with a Lamy Safari, which is typically a dry pen. I also added a few visiting pens. What is really visible here is the wide range of blue hues the ink produces in the different pens & nib sizes. That’s quite some variety for a single ink. Cool! 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 format. Golden Lapis’ base colour is fairly similar to several other inks. Iroshizuku kon-peki comes close, but is a tad lighter. In the Pelikan Edelstein line-up, Topaz would be my alternative of choice. It’s technically a better ink, and looks amazing on any type of paper. Inkxperiment – Pythagoras I’ve put myself a challenge to try to produce interesting drawings using only the ink I’m reviewing. I find this to be a fun extension of the hobby, and have found these single-ink drawings ideal for experimenting with different techniques. And creating these monochrome paintings is simply fun, and always good for a couple of hours well spent. Inspiration for this inkxperiment comes from the world of mathematics. Recently I came across an article on the internal structure of protons, which captured my attention. So I grabbed a book on particle physics, and on page 10 or so I got lost in the math... a bit embarrassing 😉. So I’m refreshing my math now, starting from the basics. And right there at the very beginning is that Greek philosopher genius of about 2500 years ago who had that great insight into the geometry of triangles. I tried to capture his wisdom into this little inkxperiment. I started with an A4 sheet of 300 gsm watercolour paper, and painted in the temple background, using Golden Lapis with multiple water/ink ratios. I then used pure ink and lots of glitter to frame the sky. Next I added the visualization of the Pythagorean theorem, and our philosopher sitting at the temple wall. The end-result gives you an idea of what can be achieved with Golden Lapis as a drawing ink. Inkxpired – computational art I love experimenting with pen/ink/paper and have added another layer as part of the hobby. I’m exploring computational art, inspired by the ink drawings I do during ink reviews. Another fun offshoot of the hobby… and all that starting with a few drops of dye-coloured water on paper. I started by using a duo-tone colour filter and added a graph paper backdrop. I then used a “tiny world” filter with focus on our philosopher. Next I used a grid-filter which also added colour to the image. The end result shows the mathematical lens through which Pythagoras viewed the world. Conclusion With this Ink of the Year, Pelikan continues to present us with a shimmer ink (please stop doing that 😉). This time with a nice bright-blue base colour that looks gorgeous on hard-surface, good-quality paper. Unfortunately, the ink suffers badly when using it on absorbent paper, with loss of shading and quite some see-through and bleed-through. A nice enough ink to try, but not one that falls in the must-have category (my opinion). Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types