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TACCIA Ukiyo-e Utamaro benizakura TACCIA is a Japanese stationery company, that is part of the Nakabayashi group. They offer high-quality fountain pens, inks, pen-rolls, notebooks, etc. More specifically, TACCIA produce a line of inks, inspired by the unique look of Ukiyo-e paintings from Japan’s Edo period (17th century). Ukiyo-e paintings are woodblock prints where the work of an artist is carved into wood by woodworkers, and pressed onto paper by printers. This allows the production of multiple prints of an artwork with some different colours as well. In this review I take a closer look at benizakura, a very bright red ink with a strong yellow-gold sheen. The colour is inspired by the red squares of the young girl’s dress in the painting “Girl blowing a glass toy”, painted by the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro around 1792-1793. This is one of his drawings from the series “Ten Physiognomic Aspects of Women”. The portrait shows a young woman with a Taka-shimada coiffure, playing with a glass toy, known as a “popen”. This thin glass object has a bulb covered with a thin diaphragm at one end and a pipe at the other. When the pipe is blown or sucked, the diaphragm makes a popping sound. Benizakura is a very bright and saturated orange-leaning red, that moves towards rose-pink in its most unsaturated form. In places of high saturation, the ink presents a heavy yellow-golden sheen on the right kind of paper (like e.g. Tomoe River). To be honest, this TACCIA ink is too saturated and bright for my personal taste, so I’m not going to use it in its raw form after this review. I’ll probable darken it up a bit by adding some grey or black. Even so, I know there are lots of people that like their inks bright and strong, so I’ll do my best to give an objective review below. The ink comes in a 40 ml bottle, that is packaged in a beautiful box showing the corresponding Ukiyo-e painting. Lovely packaging for an excellent ink. 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 a strip of 52 gsm Tomoe River paper with ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range. Benizakura has a fairly narrow colour span, with not a lot of difference between the light and dark parts. With a moderately wet pen, your writing will lean towards the more saturated part of the swab below. This translates to writing that shows little in the way of shading – the ink is too saturated for that. I only got shading when using a dry-writing Safari with broad italic nibs. The ink’s chromatography shows some unexpected complexity. The bright red is there, plus the rose-pink undertones. And there’s even some yellow in the mix, that makes this an orange-leaning red that looks fairly nice. The bottom part of the chroma already shows that most of the colour will disappear from the page when the ink comes into contact with water. This is confirmed in the water test: some rose-pink remains, but it gets heavily smeared out, and your writing will be mostly gone. Not a good ink when some measure of water resistance is on your wish list. This might be a good place to issue a word of warning. Red inks often stain a lot, but this benizakura is a real b*tch. Get it on your fingers, and you’ll probably walk around with bloody fingertips for a couple of days. In my case, people at work got curious: “did you hurt yourself?” … and I had to explain several times that inky fingers are a hazard of the hobby. Also… good pen hygiene is a must. To clean benizakura out of my review pens took 3 times the normal cleaning regimen, and I even had to use some cleaning solution to get rid of the last remnants of 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 an M-nib Lamy Safari The name of the paper used, written with a B-nib Lamy Safari A small text sample, written with the M-nib Safari Source of the quote, written with a wet Pelikan M101N with F-nib Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) Benizakura can handle both pure white and yellow-cream paper. There’s a tiny amount of feathering on lower quality paper, but nothing too bad. As can be expected from a very saturated & bright ink, there is a fair amount of see-through, even on better quality paper. And you also get quite some bleed-through on the low quality paper. Not a good ink to use on the crappy copy paper that is typically used in the workplace. Drying times are all over the place, from near eternal on high-sheen hard surface paper, to a very reasonable 10-15 seconds on absorbent papers. I’ve also added a photo to give you another view on the ink. Scanned images and photos often capture different aspects of the ink’s colour & contrast. That’s why I present them both. In this case, the photo shows the ink’s colour a bit too dark, while the scans show a tiny bit too much pink. The intro pic with the ink bottle looks about right. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. The top lines are written with my dry-writing Lamy Safari test pens, and show a small amount of shading that increases with nib width. With wet pens – like the Pelikan and Parker – the shading disappears due to the increased saturation of the ink. On the Rhodia paper used below, I didn’t see any of that beautiful yellow-golden sheen. You really need the right kind of paper to capture that. In my test set, most of the Japanese papers produced the sheen (with Tomoe River, Kobeha GRAPHILO and Yamamoto bank paper being the super-sheeners). Related inks To compare TACCIA’s benizakura 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. There are quite a number of similar-looking inks in my collection, so colourwise this benizakura is not a must have. On the other hand, the ink manages to find its own ground between the other reds – it’s still different enough to carve out its own place. Inkxperiment – A Birthday Card for my Sister With every review, I try to create a drawing using only the ink I am reviewing. These small one-ink drawings are an excellent way to show the colour-range nuances that are hidden within the ink. It’s always a pleasure to do these pieces – I really enjoy the time I can play around with the ink in this more artistic context. Inspiration for this inkxperiment was a no-brainer. My sister has her 60th birthday coming up in a couple of weeks, so I decided to draw her a birthday card – makes it a bit more personal than getting one from the magazine store. And with the same amount of effort, I got the inkxperiment drawing for this review 😉 For this drawing, I started with an A4 piece of 300 gsm watercolour paper. I first penciled in the different areas of the painting as a guideline. Next I painted in the background using heavily water-diluted ink applied through some kitchen paper. For the straight lines, I used a plastic card dipped in pure ink. The other elements were drawn in with a Lamy Safari with 1.1 calligraphy nib. While I like the design of the birthday card, this benizakura shows too little oomph to make the drawing look captivating. In my opinion, there’s just too little contrast in the painting. 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’m getting more comfortable with my digital toolbox, and was fairly confident that the birthday card could be saved. I first used an art filter that extends the contrast range, and that abstracts the drawing a bit. Next I used a filter that translated the colour range to a spectrum with yellow, green and blue. I finally added a vintage filter to age the painting up a bit. I quite like the end result: happy colours, and the composition looks good to me. So this is the birthday card that will find its way to the birthday girl. Conclusion TACCIA Ukiyo-e Utamaro benizakura is a very bright and saturated red, with a lovely golden sheen on the right kind of paper (like Tomoe River), but not much in the way of shading. Not my type of ink, but I’m sure there are lots of you that like their inks this bold and bright. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Back-side of writing samples on different paper types

TACCIA Ukiyo-e Utamaro ume murasaki TACCIA is a Japanese stationery company, that - as far as I know - is now part of the Nakabayashi group. They offer high-quality fountain pens, inks, pen-rolls, notebooks, etc. More specifically, TACCIA produce a line of inks, inspired by the unique look of Ukiyo-e paintings from Japan’s Edo period (17th century). Ukiyo-e prints are woodblock prints where the work of an artist is carved into wood by woodworkers, and pressed onto paper by printers. This allows the production of multiple prints of an artwork with some different colours as well. In this review, the star of the show is ume murasaki, a brown-purple-rose ink with an intriguing personality. The ink’s colour is inspired by the tones appearing in woodprint paintings from the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro. The ink’s inspiration comes from a 1795 portrait of Okita, a waitress who worked at the Naniwaya teahouse near the Asakusa temple in Edo. Okita was one of the most famous beauties in Edo, and was frequently depicted by Utamaro. Ume murasaki has a beautiful brown-rose colour. The ink shows some intriguing tricks too – it’s a real chameleon, that can look totally different depending on pen-nib-paper combination and depending on the light source. I love it when inks show this type of complexity in their make-up! Ume murasaki translates to “plum purple” – myself I mostly see a brown-leaning old-rose that just looks lovely on pure white paper. This TACCIA ink writes fairly saturated – with a wet pen you get a fairly brown-leaning colour without much shading (due to the heavily saturated line). Use ume murasaki with a dry pen though, and it opens up in all its exquisite beauty: seducing old-rose tones, strong but not too contrast-rich shading that looks simply wonderful. As you might guess, this ink is totally to my liking and surely one of the most intriguing inks in the TACCIA Ukiyo-e series. The ink comes in a 40 ml bottle, that is packaged in a beautiful box showing the corresponding Ukiyo-e painting. Lovely packaging for an excellent ink. 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 a strip of 52 gsm Tomoe River paper with ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range. Ume murasaki has a medium dynamic range, without too much contrast between the light and darker parts. This translates to soft but prominent shading, but only when using a dry pen. With wet pens, the increased saturation drowns out most of the shading. The ink is a real chameleon, whose colour is devilishly difficult to capture. Under my scanner it even looks purple! Below – from top to bottom: a photo taken in daylight, the purple scanner image, and a much more brown-leaning photo taken under artificial light. And yes… that’s all the same ink! This TACCIA ume murasaki looks best in daylight, so for this review I will show photos instead of scans. The ink’s chromatography shows a truly diverse mix of dyes, with rose, green, yellow and blue tones appearing. This already hints at the inherent complexity of ume murasaki. The result is a unique type of colour, that expresses itself with some real personality on the paper. TACCIA’s ink makers definitely show their craftsmanship with this creation. As can be seen from the bottom of the chromatography, this is not a water resistant ink, and as such not really suited for use at the office. Anyway… due to the purple scanning colour, this is not exactly an ink for use in a business setting. 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 an M-nib Lamy Safari The name of the paper used, written with a B-nib Lamy Safari A small text sample, written with the M-nib Safari Source of the quote, written with an Esterbrook Estie with 1.1. stub Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) Ume murasaki looks good on all types of paper, but it really excels when combined with pure white paper, where the lovely old-rose colour really comes to the front. The ink can handle all types of paper, with only the tiniest amount of feathering on crappy paper (like Moleskine, or cheap copy paper). With the low-quality paper also comes a fair amount of see-through and a tiny bit of bleed-through. You really need to combine this ink with drier pens – that brown old-rose colour with its lovely shading is really something to see! With wet pens, the increased saturation causes loss of depth, and shifts the ink to more brown-leaning tones. Drying times are surprisingly short for a wet-writing ink, and are around 10 seconds for most types of paper (with the M-nib Safari). Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. The EF-nib already shows the shading that the ink is capable of. Depending on the nib's wetness, you get more earth-brown tones, but always a good-looking result. Shading truly is a feast for the eyes – it is not too heavy, but still prominently present, resulting in an aesthetically pleasing look. Related inks To compare ume murasaki 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 ink is different from other earth-toned ones in my collection. The closest I have is Super 5 Australia Red, but that one cannot match ume murasaki’s complexity. Inkxperiment – Let’s TOK about it With every review, I try to create an interesting drawing using only the ink I am reviewing. These small one-ink pieces are an excellent way to show the colour-range nuances that are hidden within the ink. And I totally enjoy the fun couple of hours these inkxperiments provide me. Inspiration for this inkxperiment comes from a children’s book I have been reading together with the 6 year old in the family. She’s just learning to read, and one of the first stories are about chickens (“kip” in Dutch – one of the first words they learned at school). This got me browsing on Pinterest, and I came across some more-or-less abstract chicken pics, that even I can manage. Et voilà … an inkxperiment is born. For this drawing, I started with a piece of A4 HP photo paper. I first drew the background, using some cotton pads and water-diluted ink. Next I drew the chicken shapes, using pure ume murasaki. I then used water-diluted bleach and applied it with cotton Q-tips to the chicken forms. The bleach reacts really well with ume murasaki, bringing out some nice purple tones. I finally used a piece of cardboard dipped in pure ink to draw the floor of the chicken farm. The final picture gives you an impression of what can be achieved with this TACCIA ink in a more artistic setting. Not bad at all… ume murasaki works really well when used 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. For this computational derivation, I first abstracted the scene a bit, and then used negative colour filters for different parts of the drawing. I’m fairly pleased with the result I got. Conclusion TACCIA Ukiyo-e Utamaro ume murasaki is a real chameleon that can look totally different depending on context. It looks at its best when used in the right setting (i.e. dry pens, white paper, daylight) – in that case you are rewarded with an exquisite brown old-rose colour and some great-looking shading. Also a great drawing ink, with tons of character. An ink with unexpected complexity, that has a lot going for it. I loved using it. In my opinion, this is an ink that really deserves your attention. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Back-side of writing samples on different paper types

TACCIA Ukiyo-e Utamaro aomurasaki TACCIA is a Japanese stationery company, that - as far as I know - is now part of the Nakabayashi group. They offer high-quality fountain pens, inks, pen-rolls, notebooks, etc. More specifically, TACCIA produce a line of inks, inspired by the unique look of Ukiyo-e paintings from Japan’s Edo period (17th century). Ukiyo-e prints are woodblock prints where the work of an artist is carved into wood by woodworkers, and pressed onto paper by printers. This allows the production of multiple prints of an artwork with some different colours as well. In this review, I take a closer look at aomurasaki, a blue-purple-grey that is inspired by the work of the Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806). Utamaro was a highly regarded designer of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and paintings. He is best known for his “large-headed pictures of beautiful women” of the 1790’s. The woodblock painting “Geigi”, part of a series of five Ukiyo-e prints known as “Five Shades of Ink in the Northern Quarter” was created in 1794-95. Aomurasaki is modeled after the purple-grey colour in the geisha’s kimono robe. Aomurasaki is a well-saturated blue-purple, that can look almost grey in writing. The ink looks soft, muted, understated but full of depth… a complex and sophisticated ink that reflects the geisha’s elegance. Not a vibrant ink, but one that is soft & easy on the eye, well suited for long writing sessions. The ink has good flow, and works well with all nib sizes, even the few EF-nibs I have. My first impression: a great-looking ink with lots of character. Makes me think of Mariko-sana from the James Clavell Shogun book – distinguished and elegant, but with emotions whirling below the surface. I like aomurasaki a lot. To show you the impact of saturation on the ink’s look and feel on paper, I made some scribbles where I really saturated portions of a strip of 52 gsm Tomoe River paper with this TACCIA ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range. Aomurasaki has a narrow dynamic range, going from a medium-light to a much darker purple-grey. The contrast between these light and dark parts is fairly low, which translates to soft and elegant shading. Shading happens in all nib sizes, with just a hint using the EF-nib, but really present with M-nibs and above. The shading is never too fierce, but always remains unobtrusive – it just gives that desirable extra oomph to your writing, without being in your face. I like the aesthetics of the result on paper… nicely executed. The ink’s chromatography shows aomurasaki’s complex mix of dyes… I see grey, rose-purple, light-blue, and hints of other colours. Thanks to the mastery of TACCIA’s ink makers Hiroshi Ishiguro and Hanse Matsumoto, these dyes combine to the beautiful blue-purple-grey colour of aomurasaki. The bottom part of the chroma shows that the grey dye remains firmly attached to the paper, while the colour dissipates with water. The water test confirms this. I wouldn’t call aomurasaki a water-proof ink, but it can survive accidents, and what remains on the paper is still readable. That’s a plus for using this ink at the office. I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. Starting with this review, I’ve added a few new papers : Nakabayashi Prime notebook paper (75 gsm) Miquelrius 1839 recycled notebook paper (80 gsm) Yamamoto Bank Paper Takasago Premium (87.9 gsm) 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 an M-nib Lamy Safari The name of the paper used, written with a B-nib Lamy Safari A small text sample, written with an F-nib Yard-o-Led Source of the quote, with an Esterbrook journaler nib Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) Aomurasaki looks really good on both white and creamy paper. It does prefer better quality paper, showing a tiny bit of feathering and some bleed-through on the lower quality papers in my test-set. Due to the saturated nature of the ink, there is also some see-through on multiple papers. Drying times with the M-nib Lamy Safari are in the 5 to 10 second range. I’ve also added a few photos to give you another view on the ink. Scanned images and photos often capture different aspects of the ink’s colour & contrast. That’s why I present them both. In this case, the photos capture aomurasaki’s colour best – the scans of the writing samples are little bit too blue. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. The EF-nib already shows a hint of shading. But it is with the M-nib and above that the ink’s soft & elegant shading really comes into play. At first sight, the shading is not really evident, but it is there – low-key and unobtrusive - simply adding character to your writing without being in-your-face. Very nicely done, in my opinion. The ink looks beautiful and well-saturated in the fine nibs (F and EF). This is a plus when using aomurasaki at the office, where premium quality paper is not typically present. By using a finer nib, you avoid excessive feathering and see-through/bleed-through on the lower quality copy paper. Related inks To compare aomurasiki’s muted blue-purple-grey 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 Soft Snow of Ohara looks fairly similar, although with a touch more blue. Aomurasaki sits somewhere between Soft Snow of Ohara and Rober Oster Purple Rock. Diamine Vivaldi – another purple-grey – definitely leans more heavily towards grey. Inkxperiment – quantum tree With every review, I try to create an interesting drawing using only the ink I’m working on. Limiting myself to one ink allows me to showcase its colour-range nuances. It’s often quite a challenge, but always great fun. Inspiration for this drawing comes from an introductory Elementary Physics online-course I recently followed – trying to keep up-to-date with advances in cosmology and quantum mechanics. You just have to love science… from elementary particles like quarks and leptons, we get atoms, that combine to molecules, that come together in cells and that lead to the amazing large-scale structures we see in nature. Like the majestic oak, and ultimately ourselves. It’s just amazing that simple physical processes can lead to such complex emergent behaviour. I tried to capture my love of science in this quantum tree picture. I started with a piece of A4 HP photo paper, on which I painted the background with different water-ink ratios (using cotton pads). I then used different-sized jars as stamps to draw the circles (using bleach, that reacts quite strongly with aomurasaki). I filled an old and disused Kaweco Sport with bleach, and used that to draw the circuit-board lines, and the binary writing, finishing the painting. The drawing shows really well what can be achieved using aomurasaki for artistic purposes. In my opinion – a beautiful ink to draw & paint with! Conclusion TACCIA Ukiyo-e Utamaro aomurasaki is a great ink. Period. I love the understated nature of its blue-purple-grey colour, the elegance of its shading, and its overall writing properties. And on top of that, it’s also a superb drawing ink. Try it... I am sure you'll like it. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Back-side of writing samples on different paper types