Search the Community

Colour: olive / murky green Flow: moderate, in that I haven't observed it flowing so dryly that it drew my attention, or so wetly that I needed to adjust what I was doing Feathering: Not observed on Rhodia DotPad 80g/m² paper, looking closely at the thinnest hatching lines, and words/glyphs ‘reverse-written’ with the nib upside-down (i.e. the bottom of the feed facing up) Show-through: Low to nil Bleed-through: Not observed Shading: This ink has a lot of range when it comes to shading, but it's unlikely that you'll get the full range along a single pen stroke. Shading is more apparent towards the drier side of the spectrum (i.e. in terms of how much ink per unit area has been deposited); the wetter the stroke, the more subtle the shading is. The shading effect tends to be well-blended, instead of clearly demarcated between light and dark, along a single pen stroke. Sheen: None observed Shimmer: None Drying time: Depends greatly on the wetness of the line or mark. Given the broad range of shades achievable with this ink, and the different colour intensities strongly reflect the wetness of the ink mark, a light-to-medium olive green mark dries completely under 10 seconds, whereas a dark murky green mark may take longer than 30 seconds to dry, on Rhodia DotPad 80g/m² paper. Smudging after fully dry: Didn't happen when I rubbed my thumb over the hatching/stippling panel and the largest Chinese hanzi chharacters Water resistance: Effectively nil My thoughts: A pretty ink for which I have little practical use. I can't ‘afford’ to use it in a wet pen to write in that dark murky green colour that can be achieved, on account of the long drying time; an ink such as Platinum Classic Ink Forest Green would be far more suitable for that, and being water-resistant to boot. This is probably a good drawing ink, but I don't draw in colour all that much at all. As a tester ink, it would be quite apt to tell me how dryly or wetly a pen writes, but then Sailor Shikiori inks are too expensive to use as tester inks.

(Another quickie which is largely a by-product of my testing my desk pens...) Colour: I like it, it's a very pleasant dark grey tending towards the cooler side of the spectrum. I think it sorta fills a gap between Iroshizuku fuyu-syogun and Iroshizuku take-sumi which isn't filled by any of the colours in the Iroshizuku range (including shin-kai). On the other hand, there is nothing outstanding about it. Flow: Flows well enough, but not overly wet. That is a good thing. Drying time: Very quick with my 'Japanese fine' nibs, with basically no smearing after 5 seconds. My pen with the fude nib seems apt to leave a blob of ink at the top of my zeroes, and those are still prone to smearing after 20 seconds. Water resistance: Very good. Ghosting and bleed-through: None whatsoever observed from writing on the Rhodia paper I used. Shading: Some, but not very pronounced. Sheen: Not that I can see.

Another quickie review, on another 'four seasons' colours in the Sailor Jentle Ink line for which I came too late to the party, and missed out on getting it in a 50ml bottle at the old pricing. Colour: I love orange – especially when it's the colour of the garment I'm wearing, which means it's far more in others' faces than in mine, although that's not the case here – either bright and intense, or deep and dark, and I love the colour of Sailor kinmokusei, which certainly does not disappoint me in the way Iroshizuku yu-yake and Noodler's Operation Overlord Orange did. (I only just opened my bottle of Monteverde Topaz in the Gemstone Collection range, to scratch a couple of words on this test page with a dip pen and a mapping nib as a comparison, so I haven't got a very clear or detailed view yet of how it compares with Sailor kinmokusei over more extensive pieces of writing.) Feathering: None observed. Ghosting and bleed-through: None, either from writing or from repeated passes with a soaked cotton swab. Drying time: Very fast, for writing done with an EF nib with (usually) moderate-to-wet flow; there is almost no observable smearing in just five seconds. My zeroes with a 'broader' nib tend to leave one or two wet spots around the oval shape, and there is some smearing of the '30s' even though the '25s' mark did not smear. Water resistance: Forget about it. Shading: Very subtle, if any, along a single stroke of the pen or an unbroken line, in spite of the range of shades this ink can display. I don't have a problem with that. Sheen: None that I can see on the Rhodia paper I used, and that's fine by me. My verdict: I like this ink, it is well-behaved, but with the 'new' pricing for 20ml bottles in the Sailor Shikiori line, I'm not going to rush about to buy spare bottles just yet, especially when I haven't spent enough time using Monteverde Topaz or perhaps trying Diamine Pumpkin.

Yodaki(夜焚) is the summer colour in Sailor's most recent series of Shikiori, or Four Seasons, dye inks in what was the Jentle Ink product line. If I'm not mistaken, it is one of the Sailor inks that has only ever been available for retail in the new 20ml bottles, at the new pricing greatly inflated above that of the discontinued 50ml retail Jentle Ink bottles. All the same, I really wanted to love this ink in spite of that, after reading Lgsoltek's review of it, and it looks like such a good match for my new (eleventh) Pilot Vanishing Point with the deep red birch barrel. http://www.pilot.co.jp/products/fc_25sk_dr.jpg (image from Pilot Corporation's product page for the pen) Alas, I bought the ink (shipped directly from Japan), filled the pen with it, tried it and struggle to get along with it. (Now, this falls a little short of a full ink review, since I'm still slowly working out what I want to do and what I want to cover. I started this particular test page with a view to answering a completely different question; so, again I'm only using one type of paper that does not cover all the use cases that I think are worthwhile.) Flow This is a 'wet' ink. There, I said it, even though I professed to be disinclined to categorise inks in that manner. I have never met an ink that is more keen to escape the converter, be it through the feed and nib or otherwise. Given that I was testing three differently nib widths for the Pilot VP, I thought the reasonable thing to do would be to just detach the converter from one nib and then attach it to another other. In five years of using Pilot VP pens, I've learnt roughly how much unfilled space I need to leave at the tip of the converter, so that ink wouldn't just gush out from the other end when I connect it to the feed, ... except that it didn't quite work out that way with this ink. It gushed. After removing some ink from the converter and trying again, it didn't start bleeding from every orifice, but then it wrote so wetly that ink was pooling along each pen stroke even after two lines of writing, and taking some ten minutes to dry on the page, I kid you not. That ruined my first attempt at producing the test page. It wasn't just with the M nib (which is the widest of the lot) that this happened, either; I also got that with the F nib, both of which are not new nibs to me. (My new Pilot VP pen came with an EF nib.) After a bit of trial and error, I found that I had to leave about 20-25% of the converter empty for that not to happen with this ink. Next, after the few lines of writing I do with each nib, I was surprised time and again how much ink was consumed. Maybe it just ended up in the long neck of the VP nib, but that's not usually the case with my VP pens, and a single full refill lasts ages. Not with this ink. Then, while I held the converter with the open end pointing up in one hand, to reach for the ink bottle with the other, ink would just somehow leap out of the half-full converter only the test page or my desk. Usually inks would stay inside the converter even if I held it with the open end pointing down! Not with this ink. The splatter on the test page between '5' and '10', between '15' and '20', and on the last line of Chinese writing came from different instances of the ink making daring escapes. So, yes, I'm now convinced there is such a thing as an undeniably 'wet' ink. Drying time Coupled with a 'wet' writer, this ink is still prone to some degree of smearing after 30 seconds, at least on the Rhodia paper I used. I'm not sure whether there is some unevenness in how certain components of the ink are distributed in the liquid, or that my pen burped in a way that I didn't visually detect, but the smearing in the middle of the third line of Chinese actually happened quite a number of minutes after the line was written. Maybe a couple of microscopic droplets of water landed there out of nowhere. Whatever the cause, this is one ink I would not count on not smearing after a full page of writing. Ghosting and bleed-through Effectively none just from normal writing. Where I wrote 'SHEEN' and 'Sheen' are special cases; I was deliberately trying to produce ultra-wet writing I observed earlier, in order to elicit an astounding amount of sheen. (More on that below.) Water resistance This ink has a fair amount of water resistance. OK, surprisingly good, actually. Shading This ink proved apt to produce shading, but you may have to look closely, because it doesn't appear as pronounced as in some other inks. Sheen Oh, this ink sheens alright, even on Rhodia paper if one lets his pen write way more wetly than is healthy. Where I have written 'SHEEN' and 'Sheen' were (counter-productive) attempts to reproduce this effect I observed, when I was trying to work out how my first test page got ruined. Interestingly, there was no bleed-through on the reverse side of that word. My Verdict Given the per-ml price of this ink, how the 'wetness' of the ink itself seems to want to push consumption to a whole new level than what is acceptable to me, and how it managed to get all over the inside of the half of the pen barrel that has the trapdoor, I'm not so keen on using it in my Pilot VP pen any more. With so many similar colours in my collection of inks from which to choose, I think I'll have a lot more peace of mind with Sailor okuyama, Diamine Red Dragon or Diamine Oxblood, and that's not even counting new inks I have already bought but never got around to trying yet, such as the Monteverde Gemstone collection.

So it seems like Sailor decided to consolidate all the Shikiori-related products they released before (pen) into a single line of product called "Shikiori" (spelled out in English) with a new logo. The first 4 steel-nib fountain pens under this new label will be released in October, joining the previous 4 higher-priced counterparts released in the past. Also, the new release will also include ballpoint pen and mechanical pencil versions with the same design. There's also 4 ink colors with new bottle and package design released for this series - 20 ml for 1000 yen. Sailor's new page for Shikiori product line: http://www.sailor.co.jp/shikiori/ .... now I'm more worried about what they're planning to do with the old shikiro ink colors and bottles, if this line becomes dominant.