Search the Community

Colorverse Under the shade Colorverse is a South Korean company that produces inks that are well-known for their iconic bottles and for their astronomy-related names. But they also make other inks, and this review covers one of them. “Under the shade” is part of the theme-based “Joy in the Ordinary” Earth Edition. This is a set of 6 inks that complement each other nicely. And with a brilliant creative touch, the box designers made sure that the pictures on the side of the six boxes combine to create a bigger tableau. Colorverse Under the shade is a medium cool-toned grey. The ink has a very interesting chroma, with loads of colour tones present in the mix. When doing swabs these underlying colours are clearly visible and slowly fade away when the ink dries, disappearing again under the surface. I love grey inks and had high hopes for this one. Alas… there are some fairly heavy flaws that surface when pulling the ink from the shade and examining it more closely in the bright sunlight. There’s nothing wrong with the ink’s colour… I quite like it, and the ink turned out to be an excellent one to draw with. But it’s when the writing starts that the flaws appear, and worse, these flaws re-enforce one another making the ink quite unusable for me as a writing ink. First: the ink has near eternal dry times on hard surface, high quality paper (i.e. most Japanese paper). Next, on hard surface paper the shading gets really extreme… to the point that it becomes ugly (my personal opinion – in reality, the effect is worse than the photos of the writing samples below suggest). On absorbent paper, the ink is sucked quasi instantly into the paper with near to zero drying time. Here, shading is almost absent… all the ink is drawn into and “through” the paper, resulting in quite a bit of see-through and even bleed-through. It becomes very difficult to find a pen/nib/paper combination that works well with “Under the shade”. This Colorverse ink has a fairly wide colour range, ranging from a very faint (almost invisible) grey to a more saturated medium grey. With dry pens that tend to use the left side of the saturation span, the ink is too light for writing. So definitely an ink to use with wet-writing pens. But that just means even longer drying times. Still… I like the ink best with wet and broader nibs … the colour gets a bit more saturated, and the shading – while still strong – looks less extreme. On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – there is almost no smearing. Which is a surprise, given the ink’s long drying times. On closer inspection, there is smearing of the ink, but it’s of a really light-grey colour that isn’t disturbing at all. Water resistance is remarkable good – both with the still water test (letting drops of water sit on the page for 15 minutes) as with the running water test. Most of the ink remains firmly attached to the paper, and remains very readable. This makes it useful for the office. Also, most office printing paper is absorbent, which means almost zero drying time. And to compensate for the see/bleed-through, you could use an EF or F nib (like the Pilot Capless F that I used in the nib size comparison text). 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 Lamy Safari B-nib A small text sample, written with the M-nib The source of the quote, written with an Esterborrk Estie with 1.1 stub Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib) Colorverse Under the shade shows almost no feathering, not even on low quality paper. Again, this makes it a good candidate ink for the office, where lower quality printing paper is the norm. Just use a fine nib to keep the unavoidable see/bleed-through to a minimum. The ink looks best on pure white paper, where the medium grey looks really pretty. Unfortunately, this Colorverse ink just doesn’t work well with high quality paper: both the extreme shading and the eternal drying times ruin the experience for me. Which is a shame, because I quite like the colour. I had to use photos for the writing samples because my scanner couldn’t cope with the extreme shading present on many of the papers. Below you’ll find some zoomed-in parts of writing samples. The very heavy shading is really obvious, and looks even more extreme to the naked eye. In my opinion, the photo looks too flattering: in reality the contrast between light and dark parts of the text is more extreme, to the extent that a full written page looks harsh and angry. The aesthetics are just not right. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. With the dry-writing Lamy Safari pens, the ink’s colour is a bit too light for my taste. The B nib looks really good though. The wetter-writing visiting pens also look quite good, although the shading with the 1.1 Estie pen is already a bit too heavy for me. Related inks To compare “Under the shade” 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. Diamine Silver Fox comes close in colour, and is – in my opinion – a better ink with a better balanced contrast range that makes for a more pleasant look on the paper. Inkxperiment – Me and My Book With every review I try to do a single-ink drawing that shows what the ink is capable of in a more artistic setting. The most fun part of the ink review, and I quite enjoy brainstorming and then implementing these little pieces. This is the first drawing in a new series – “Counting … ONE two three”. So this is number one – a simple scene with one tree and one person. In this case, an impression of my favourite pass-time: reading a book, sitting in the park while enjoying the first warm sun of spring. Life is good! For this inkxperiment I started with a piece of A4 HP photo paper. I covered the sun, and used some cotton make-up swabs to paint in the sky. I then used a fine brush and painted in the main parts of the tree using pure ink. For the finer branches, I simply used my fountain pen. At the end of each stroke, you get a more saturated dot (where I lifted the pen from the page), which works well as the budding leaves that start to appear in early spring. I finally added the person reading a book as the finishing touch. Overall, I really like “Under the shade” as a drawing ink… in my opinion a really good ink for artistic work. 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 it really simple. All I did was applying an urban art filter to the original drawing. I like the colour scheme of this one. Conclusion Colorverse “Under the shade” is difficult ink that gets a love/hate reaction from me. I love the colour, and the expressiveness of this ink when drawing. I hate it as a writing ink – it’s just too darn difficult to find a pen/nib/paper combination that works well. If you like extreme shading, you might even like this ink for writing, but for me it just didn’t work. Still, I enjoyed exploring it for the purposes of this review. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types