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TAG Kyoto – kyo-no-oto #13 seiheki TAG is a stationery shop in Kyoto (Japan) that produces some interesting soft watercolour-style inks. With the kyo-no-oto series they produce a line of inks that replicates traditional Japanese dye colours. According to available online info, the manufacturing process of the kyo-no-oto inks follows traditional dying techniques dating back to the Heian era between the years 794 and 1185. The inks come in 40 ml bottles, packaged in luxurious thick paper with a texture that feels like heavy watercolour paper. In this review I take a closer look at seiheki, a pale green and blue that takes its inspiration from the colour of the daytime sky. In a deviation from previous inks in the kyo-no-oto series, TAG Kyoto decided to produce a pigment-based ink. It’s described online as a light pigment ink, with a combination of fine pigment particles and dyes. Just to get this out of the way: this was a really bad move! Where previous kyo-no-oto inks were a joy to use, this one is a pure nightmare! This ink just doesn’t work with fountain pens. It dries in the feed like crazy: after a day or so, my pens didn’t write anymore. I had to clean them first, just to get them writing again for the purposes of this review. And this behaviour was consistent across the 3 test pens I use below. You are warned! This ink is for dip pens only. Seiheki gets my points for biggest disappointment of the year! On the positive side: the pale green and blue colour of Seiheki is really beautiful…. I totally love it. The complexity is simply stunning: when writing/drawing with the ink you see blue and green and even yellow, clearly visible in one and the same ink. It must be seen to be believed. The ink manages to walk a line between blue and green that meanders between both sides. One time you definitely see a pale blue colour, the next instant the ink imprints itself on your brain as a green. Simply wonderful. Seiheki is a pale and unsaturated ink. This makes it soft and wispy and delicate, but it also makes it difficult to read. You really need a very wet writer to get enough contrast with the paper – e.g. by using a dip pen. But to be brutally honest: I think the ink is way too light to be usable for normal writing. For me, this ink should be dedicated to ink artistry: it looks great in ink drawings. 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 the Tomoe River paper with ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range. Seiheki has a medium dynamic range, going from a wispy green/blue that’s barely there, to a slightly more saturated pale colour. With most inks, a medium dynamic range translates to soft and elegant shading. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case here. The lighter strokes are simply too light, and barely visible. As a result, the writing feels broken, with choppy shading that looks quite ugly (especially in person – the photos in this review softened up that choppy shading. I assure you that it looks a lot worse to the naked eye). The chromatography clearly shows the colour components that are present in this ink: blue, green, and yellow. These usually mix together to give a more-or-less uniform colour, but not so with Seiheki. Here the colours manage to live their own lives and can surface independently from one another. Maybe that’s because of the pigmented nature of the ink, where the colour particles live in a suspension rather than a solution? It’s a mystery to me, but the result is a multi-chrome ink with a lovely complexity – just take a look at the inkxperiment at the end of this review: all this colour variation from one ink! I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. On every small band 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 wet Parker F-nib The name of the paper used, written with a BB-nib Kaweco A small text sample, written with the F-nib Parker Source of the quote, with a wet-writing Edison Collier 1.1 stub Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the F-nib Parker) Due to the pale colour of the ink and the fact that it struggles with fountain pens, I couldn’t use my normal Safari test pens for the writing samples. Instead, I used some of my wettest pens, and even those struggled mightily with this pigment based Seiheki. Overall the writing samples confirm that Seiheki is too light to be usable for everyday writing. Also, that choppy shading looks horrible. There is one interesting fact though that really surprised me: Seiheki writes at its best on crappy paper. The more absorbent the paper, the better the writing experience. My impression was that the absorbent paper helped ink flow. In contrast, with hard surface paper, the writing experience was terrible. I’ve also added a scan of some writing samples to give another view on the ink. As you can see, my scanner couldn’t cope with the paleness and high-contrast, and made a mess of the representation. The photos look more realistic, although they softened up that choppy shading too much. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. Kyo-no-oto seiheki is very pale with low saturation, making it a bad match for my dry-writing Safari test pens. The wet visiting pens did a little better but suffered mightily from the ink drying in the feed over a short span of time. I got the best results with dip pens – saturation increases, and there are obviously no issues with ink flow. Related inks To compare this soft green and blue seiheki 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. The comparison shows the uniqueness of seiheki’s colour – I have nothing in my ink collection that comes close to it. Inkxperiment – park playground With every review, I try to create an inkxperiment using only the ink I’m working on. These one-ink drawings are a great way to show off the colour-range nuances that are present in the ink. I really enjoy doing them: it’s fun, and a good way to stretch my creativity and drawing skills. This is the third and final drawing in a series – “Counting … one two THREE”. This final picture shows a scene with three trees and three persons. In this case, a young family enjoying their time together at the park playground. Life is good! I started with a piece of HP photo paper on which I drew the sky with cotton swabs dipped in water diluted ink (covering up the sun and foreground). Blue and yellow tones come to the front. I next used a fine brush to draw the trees, and added the family grouping in the foreground. Finally, I used the rough side of a dish-washing pad to add the foliage in the trees with pure seiheki. Notice the green tones that dominate here. I really enjoyed using kyo-no-oto seiheki for drawing … there is a lot of complexity present in this ink! This inkxperiment drawing shows quite well what can be achieved with this blue/green ink in a more artistic setting. 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. For this computational derivation, I kept is simple. I first used a “warm” colour filter, and next applied the same urban art filter I used with the previous drawings in this series. The resulting pictures works well for me. This concludes the “Counting… one two three” mini-series of drawings. Below, you can see the three paintings together. I enjoyed the format of the mini-series a lot: a set of drawings developing across time, telling a story that slowly develops. Conclusion I’ve tried a number of TAG Kyoto inks to date and loved them all. Until now! Coincidence or not, this number 13 in the kyo-no-oto line turned out to be a disaster as a fountain pen ink. Totally unusable, and it should be kept away from fountain pens. But what a great colour for drawing! I won’t be using this ink again in my pens, but will most certainly revisit it for more artistic playtime. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper Back-side of writing samples on different paper types