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Teranishi Guitar – Innocent Mauve Teranishi Chemical Industries was founded during the Taisho period in 1918, and got quite some fame as one of the earlier ink producers in Japan. The Taisho period is often remembered as a romantic era. For their 105th anniversary, the company introduced some stylish retro-inks, hinting at this exciting start-up period. The inks come in stylish – almost art deco – boxes, containing a nice-looking 40ml bottle of ink. I discovered the Teranishi inks in 2022, so it’s time to do the reviews. These inks are well saturated, but at the same time manage to look muted and toned-down. This combination works quite well, and I’m becoming very fond of this brand. In this review, the spotlight shines on Innocent Mauve, a dusty grape-coloured purple. This is not my favourite type of colour, but I will still do my best to provide an unbiased review of the ink. I definitely see myself using this as an office ink: in a fine nibbed pen, the ink looks quite dark and businesslike, and it also shows a bit of water resistance. I usually scan my ink review text samples, but with Innocent Mauve this turned out to be impossible. In scans, the ink turns into more of a lilac – wildly diverging form the real-life grape-purple colour. So, for this review, I almost exclusively use photos to show off the ink. Innocent Mauve writes wet and well saturated, even in the finest nibs. Wet pens and fine nibs lay down a fairly dark purple line. With italic nibs and drier pens you get lighter tones, and – in my opinion – more aggressive and less appealing shading. For me, the sweet spot for this ink is a fine nibbed wet pen. You then get a nice dark grape-purple colour with some beautiful unobtrusive shading. To illustrate the colour span of this Teranishi ink, I did a swab on 52 gsm Tomoe River paper, where I really saturated portions of the paper with ink. Innocent Mauve has a fairly wide dynamic range, with quite some contrast between the light and darker parts. Finer nibs tend to concentrate the ink more, leaning towards the right side of the spectrum. You thus get the darker grape-purple colour, and less aggressive shading. Dry pens fit the left-hand side of the colour range, which – in my opinion – results in a less appealing colour. The saturation sample below also illustrates the huge colour difference between photo and scanned image: first you see the photo, followed by the scanned image that definitely shows more of a lilac colour. Don’t be fooled … the lilac is an illusion! In real life, Innocent Mauve is a grape-coloured ink. And now the lilac leaning scan: On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – the text remains perfectly readable, even if a lot of the dyes get displaced. Water resistance is mediocre: just good enough to survive an accident. Enough of the dyes remain attached to the paper to allow for a reconstruction of the written word. This is also evident from the chromatography that shows some grey dyes clinging to the paper at the bottom part. The chroma also shows the complex mix of dyes used to create this grape-purple Innocent Mauve. The grey at the bottom contributes to the dusty appearance of the ink – which is a constant theme across the Teranishi ink series. But I also see some cherry-red and sky-blue in the mix, which I hadn’t expected. Combined, these dyes create the dusty grape-purple colour of this Teranishi ink. I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. 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 a Lamy Safari M-nib fountain pen The name of the paper used, written with a Lamy Safari B-nib A small text sample, written with the Lamy Safari M-nib Source of the quote, written with an M-nib Laban Rosa Lilac pen Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) The multi-paper writing test shows that Teranishi Innocent Mauve handles all types of paper well. It even behaves very good on the low-quality Moleskine paper: no visible feathering, and only some see-through and bleed-through. The ink looks equally good on both white and more yellow paper. Drying times are in the 10 to 15 second range on most papers. Exceptions are the Kobeha GRAPHILO and Endless Regalia paper, which consistently showed longer drying times in the 20-25 second range. For the sake of completeness, I also add a scan of text written on a number of different papers. As you can see, this shows a lilac purple, that has zero relation to what your eyes see when looking at Innocent Mauve. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing (written on Rhodia N°16 80 gsm paper). All samples were written with a Lamy Safari. I also added a couple of visiting pens: a wet-writing TWSBI VAC Mini with M-nib, and my Laban Rosa Lilac with M-nib. As you can see, Innocent Mauve handles all nib sizes well, but really shines with the finer nibs up to M-size. You get a more concentrated dusty-dark colour and more aesthetically pleasing shading. Related inks To compare Teranishi Innocent Mauve 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. Innocent Mauve clearly relates with Diamine Grape, but after a dust-storm has swept across the vineyard. The grey components of this Teranishi ink contribute to the gritty faded look, and give more of a vintage vibe to the ink colour. Inkxperiment – Walk in the Fields With every ink review, I challenge myself to create a monochromatic drawing using only the ink I’m reviewing. I always enjoy this part of the review: playing with the ink, and seeing how it behaves in a more artistic context. Always good for a couple of quality-time hours. Inspiration for this drawing comes from some early summer walks through nearby fields. The original drawing used a 3:2 landscape size ratio. But when the drawing was almost finished, I accidentally dropped a huge blob of ink on the left side. So I added a new sun to the painting, and used a square cut-out to crop off the ink blob, thus saving the inkxperiment (and avoiding starting over 😉 I started with an A4 piece of HP photo paper. I drew in the background with heavily water-diluted ink. I then stamped in the flower field with a piece of tightly rolled-up kitchen paper, and added the house and road. I finally added the tree with my B-nibbed Lamy Safari and pure Innocent Mauve. Due to the ink blob accident, the last thing I added was the sun above the field of flowers, fitting nicely in the - now square - format. 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 applying a colour filter that strongly enhanced the contrast in the original inkxperiment painting. Next I used a modern art tool that uses a superposition of shifted images with multiple colour filters. I like the more chaotic look of the end result, that still keeps true to the original concept of a “Walk in the Fields”. Conclusion Teranishi Innocent Mauve is a nice dusty grape-coloured ink with a vintage vibe. Not my usual type of colour, but I do like it in fine-nibbed wet pens, where it makes for a great office ink. Due to its fairly wide expressive range, this Teranishi ink also works really well as a drawing ink. If you like the colour, it’s well worth checking out. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types