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Ink flow: Surprising dry in my converter-fed Pilot Kaküno. When I'm using just a Pilot steel F nib as a dip pen nib with no feed, the ink doesn't seem to really want to cling to the metal, but is in something of a hurry to get onto the page instead; I think that was what was making the marks on the first part of the ink review sheet look much darker/wetter. Drying time: There is still minimal smudging after 25, 30, or even 40 seconds if you're really looking for offence. Generally speaking, after 25 seconds there isn't enough smudging to distract. Even especially wet writing doesn't seem to take much longer to dry to the point of being safe to touch. Water resistance: Poor. Ink marks start disappearing from the page once wet for longer than (my guesstimate of) 60 seconds. Feathering: None to minimal on Rhodia DotPad 80g/m² paper. I did see a little bit of it on an earlier test sheet with the odd, extraordinarily wet ink mark. Show-through: Except where the ring made by the mouth of the ink bottle is, no show-through is observed. Bleed-through: Not observed on Rhodia DotPad 80g/m² paper. Shading: You bet. Some shading to lavender/violet in both drier ink marks and wetter ink marks. Shading in muted blue is much more distinct where the ink marks are drier. Sheen: Not observed. Shimmer: No.

I'm feeling terribly out of the loop, when earlier today I discovered Sailor's new series of Yurameku inks, which are already available from a couple of stockists on these shores! With no mention of them at all so far on FPN (and so I'm doing my duty to bring them up now), I haven't heard of them, and I wouldn't have come across them had I not been looking at my options for getting another bottle of Pilot Iroshizuku Tsukushi, including locally. I can now see they were talked about on reddit since early December, by hobbyists who have already bought them. Source: Bookbinders Design Australia Source: LarryPOST As multi-hued inks, they look interesting, but at the same price (¥1,500+tax) as a 50ml bottle of Pilot Iroshizuku ink for a 20ml bottle of Sailor ink, they're a bit too rich for me, when I balk even at buying the cheaper Ink Studio series (¥1,200+tax). Is anyone keen?

Has anyone tried any of the 芸景堂 (yún jǐng táng) inks, especially those from Season Seven, which seem to be in the vein of the lighter, multi-hued colours in the Sailor Ink Studio line? Source: AliExpress At nominally US$8.80 per 30ml bottle, I think they're priced competitively against Sailor Ink Studio and Sailor Manyo inks, assuming that they are as good and/or interesting as the Japanese inks. However, shipping charges for bottle of ink (and often customs issues with exporting liquids through the post from China) and border taxes lift the effective averaged cost of acquisition to over US$13 a bottle if I were to order all three of the above at once, and still have to keep my fingers crossed that they get past Chinese Customs and get delivered here intact and without incident, so I'm not as gung-ho about just spending money on them as I usually would be. There's also this seemingly colour-shifting shimmer ink: Source: AliExpress but my confidence level is quite low in shimmer inks from China having consistently small particle size to not cause clogging in my (typically Fine-nibbed) fountain pens.