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Teranishi Guitar – Orchestra Tangerine Teranishi Chemical Industries – based in Osaka, Japan – was founded during the Taisho period around 1916, and got quite some fame as one of the earlier ink producers in Japan. For their 105th anniversary, the company introduced some stylish retro-inks, hinting at this exciting start-up period. The inks come in beautiful – almost art deco – boxes, containing a nice-looking 40ml bottle of ink. I discovered the Teranishi inks in 2022, and have enjoyed them a lot. 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 Orchestra Tangerine, a red-orange ink with heavy shading and lots of depth. Tangerine is a colour full of joy – it really brightens the day, just what is needed when it’s dark and cold and wet outside. Orchestra Tangerine is well-saturated, maybe a touch too dry, but it writes really well with most pens. Only with my dry-writing Lamy Safari EF and my Kaweco Supra F did that dryness surface – lubrication was just too low to offer a pleasurable writing experience. With wetter pens or with M-nibs and above, the ink will catch up and that touch of dryness disappears. I personally forgive the ink this minor slip up, which can easily be corrected by switching to another pen. The ink’s colour really hits the mark for me. It’s not easy to create a good orange. Use a mostly single-dye colour and the result can look flat and uninteresting. Create your orange through a mix of multiple dyes, and you need to be very careful to strike just the right balance. This Orchestra Tangerine uses a complex mix of dyes, and manages to bring the best out of that combination… lovely shading that moves from a light orange to much darker red tones, lots of depth and character, a bright colour that at the same time is not too “in your face”. 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. Orchestra Tangerine has a medium colour span without a strong contrast between light and darker parts. This results in shading that – while still strong – is well balanced and aesthetically pleasing. On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – the ink shows lots of orange smearing, but the text itself can still easily be read. Water resistance is completely absent. Most of the dyes get washed away, leaving greyish pink & oranges smudges behind. This is also evident from the chromatography – most of the component dyes move easily with water. The chroma also shows the complex mix of dyes used to create this beautiful orange. Surprisingly, with so much rose&pink in the mix, it’s a wonder that none of that pink-ness comes to the surface. Teranishi’s ink makers succeeded in keeping the rose&pink component under tight control and bound within the ink. In writing & drawing, only orange and red tones are visible. Really well done! 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 B-nib Safari A small text sample, written with the M-nib Safari Source of the quote, written with a Sailor 1911 with M-stub Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) The multi-paper writing test shows that Teranishi Orchestra Tangerine plays nice with both white and cream paper. It can also handle low-quality paper really well – with Moleskine, there’s only a tiny bit of feathering visible. With absorbent papers, you do get quite some bleed-through, making it impossible to use the backside of the page. Drying times are fairly short, mostly in the 10-20 second range, with the longest drying times on glossy paper. Overall, a technically solid ink. I used photos for the writing samples above to get the most accurate results. In scans, the ink looks a bit too brown to me - see the scanned image below. Below you’ll find some zoomed-in parts of writing samples. Notice the tiny amount of feathering on the Moleskine paper. With strong absorbent paper – like Peter Pauper – you lose most of the shading, the ink has no time to settle at the surface, but is sucked immediately into the paper. With hard-surface paper – like the Iroful – the ink’s shading properties are expressed at their best. Lovely! 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 Piloit Capless with M-nib, a Sailor 1911 with M-stub and the dry Kaweco Supra with F-nib. This Orchestra Tangerine seems to be made for stub nibs, where the playful & strong shading gets beautifully expressed, and where the ink has the chance to show off its true potential. Related inks To compare Teranishi Orchestra Tangerine 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. Kyo-iro Moonlight of Higashiyama has that same depth to it, but is more of a burnt-orange colour with brown-earth tones. Inkxperiment – Space Flowers : Jupiter As a personal challenge, I try to create interesting drawings using only the ink I’m reviewing. For me, that’s where the fun starts: experimenting with the ink to see how it behaves in a more artistic context. And as is often the case with orange-toned inks, this Teranishi Orchestra Tangerine seems to be born to draw with. This is part two in a short mini-series of eerie-looking space flowers. The red-orange colour of this ink made me think of the great red-spot of Jupiter, which shows those same red-oranges hues. So it’s no surprise that the flowers in this picture originate from Jupiter. I started with an A4 piece of HP photo paper, and used circular cut-outs from a kitchen towel to create the textured background. To create the effect, I cover the photo paper with the kitchen towel, and drip water diluted ink on it, which I then press onto the underlying paper using cotton pads. Next, I painted the sky with heavily water diluted ink, applied with cotton pads (keeping the sun covered with a circular piece of cardboard). Against this backdrop, I used a glass dip-pen and a felt-tip pen with pure ink to add the Jovian flowers. The resulting drawing shows quite well wat can be achieved with Orchestra Tangerine 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 applying a lens-blur filter to the drawing that overexposed the image, and followed up with a polygon filter. I then shifted the colours to more yellow hues, which brought out more details in the drawing. Conclusion Teranishi Orchestra Tangerine is a great ink: a beautiful red-orange that looks good on all types of paper. It has some lubrication issues with fine nibs in dry pens, but that’s not the type of pen this ink is made for. This is an ink for stub-nibs where the ink can express its shading capabilities in all its splendor. And if you’re interested in using inks artistically – this Orchestra Tangerine deserves your attention. It’s a great ink to draw with. I really enjoyed experimenting with it! Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types