Search the Community

There's a eBay promotion in play for 26/9/2021 that gives any random Joe Punter 20% off the prices in Peter's of Kensington's official eBay store, or 22% off for eBay Plus members. Sadly, not much of interest to me personally (even if I were still in the market for pens and inks today), but I'll call out that: Monteverde 10-colour (Bloo, Emotions, Gemstone, and Noir ink collections) gift sets are now A$56 (or less) after discount Pelikan Souverän M605 Green-White fountain pen (different nib sizes still available) is now A$416.80 (or less) after discount That is much cheaper than ordering it from my normal go-to European retailers for Pelikan products, even after stacking discounts to get an overall 19%–20% off the regular price, and with ‘free’ international shipping by DHL. I personally wouldn't be able to get those items any cheaper anywhere else.

InkShift – L'Artisan Pastellier Callifolio Heure Dorée to Noir With their Callifolio line of inks, L'Artisan Pastellier has produced some really nice ink colours. Some of them are better than others, though. I really like Heure Dorée as a drawing ink, and it is undoubtedly a beautiful ink for journaling with wet & broad pens. But... I'm typically using F/M nibs on my pens, and with these Heure Dorée is definitely too light for my taste. Time to darken it up a bit by adding a bit of Noir - the black ink of the Callifolio series, and see what this produces. Below is a set of progressive mixes I used while looking for an interesting combination. This mixing experiment turned out really well. In fact, I like almost all combinations. The mixes shift from a yellow- to a green-olive colour. I even like the dirty-green 1:1 mix. I have several favourites this time: The 1:15 mix makes for a very readable yellow-olive The 1:5 mix looks like a nice green-olive The 1:1 mix is an intriguing dirty-green I haven't made up my mind yet about my absolute favourite. I would be interested to know what people on the forum consider theirs - please let me know. My plan is to choose one of the mixes in the coming days, and do a more comprehensive review which I will post here on the forum.

L'Artisan Pastellier Callifolio - Noir L'Artisan Pastellier is a small company in southern France that specialises in natural pigments, and offers customers authentic and reliable products in beautiful colours based on mineral or vegetable pigments. In a collaboration with Loic Rainouard from Styloplume.net, the chemist Didier Boinnard from L'Artisan Pastellier created the line of Callifolio fountain pen inks. These pastel-coloured inks are traditionally crafted, and can be freely mixed and matched. Overall these inks are only moderately saturated, and have low water-resistance. The inks were specifically designed to work well with all types of paper, and all types of fountain pens. Being pastel-tinted, these inks have a watercolour-like appearance, and are not only fine inks for journaling, but are also really excellent inks for doodling & drawing. I only recently discovered them, and they are already the inks I gravitate towards for personal journaling. In this review I take a closer look at Noir - the black ink of the Callifolio line. It seems every inkmaker feels obliged to have a black ink in its collection, and L'Artisan Pastellier is no exception. In my opinion they shouldn't have bothered... there are already enough black inks on the market. On the other hand Callifolio inks were designed to be freely mixed, so this black could probably be used in your own mixes to darken up some other colours (that's one rabbit hole I haven't dived into yet ;-) Noir is not a deep black but more of a very dark gray, which is especially noticeable in swabs. I found the ink to be undersaturated in the finer nibs, with an unpleasing aesthetics as a result. Below this review you'll find writing samples in different nib widths. It's only with broader nibs that the ink starts to look nice with some subdued shading. With fine nibs, the text looks really bland and uninspiring. On the smudge test - rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab - Noir exhibits quite some smearing, but the text itself remains readable. This ink smudges easily. Combined with a rather long drying time, this means you have to be extra careful while writing. Definitely not an ink for lefties. The ink has almost no water resistance. With a 15-minute soak in still water, the text is completely obliterated, leaving an undecipherable mess. Running tap water provides a better result. The ink detaches almost completely from the paper, but a faint greyish ghost image of your writing remains that can still be read quite easily. I have tested the ink on a wide variety of paper - from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. For the Callifolio reviews, I'm using a new format to show you the ink's appearance and behaviour on the different paper types. On every small band of paper I show you:An ink swab, made with a cotton Q-tip1-2-3 pass swab, to show increasing saturationAn ink scribble made with an F-nib fountain pen (Pelikan M200)The name of the paper used, written with a B-nibA small text sample, written with an F-nib (Pelikan M200)Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the F-nib)Callifolio Noir behaved perfectly on all the paper types I used, with only some very minor feathering on the lower quality papers in my test set (Moleskine and HP 80gsm printing paper). Drying times are fairly long in the 20-25 second range on most papers, with up to 30 seconds on the smoother papers like Tomoe River. In my opinion, this makes the ink useless as an everyday writing ink because you have to be too careful with regard to smudging. At the end of the review, I also show the back-side of the different paper types, in the same order. The ink behaved superbly on all paper types. Only with Moleskine did I notice a tiny bit of bleed-through. Conclusion Callifolio Noir from L'Artisan Pastellier is a not so great black (or should I say dark grey) that has too many shortcomings to be considered a good ink. Drying times are way too long which results in easy smudging of your writing. The ink also looks bland and uninteresting in the finer nibs, only showing some character with broad and stub nibs. If you're looking for a black ink, you should look elsewhere. There are lots of better blacks on the market. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Pelikan M200, F-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types

I'm planning to get a Rouge et Noir black, but would like a nib with stubbish properties. I've got a B nib Wilde which has got wonderful line variation and is just lovely, but generally I don't like my nibs to be too broad. Do you think my best chance of getting what I want lies in an OM, B or OB? I realise every nib is hand finished so nothing can be guaranteed!

Scribe's inks are fairly new to the market (I think) so this is probably a bit of a long shot, but I was hoping someone might have tried Pinot Noir. If you have, could you possibly post a few pictures of it? It looks like my kind of red, but I'm not sure if they ship outside of the States