Search the Community

L'Artisan Pastellier Callifolio - Yalumba L'Artisan Pastellier is a small company in southern France that specialises in natural pigments, and offers customers authentic and reliable products in beautiful colours based on mineral or vegetable pigments. In a collaboration with Loic Rainouard from Styloplume.net, the chemist Didier Boinnard from L'Artisan Pastellier created the line of Callifolio fountain pen inks. These pastel-colored inks are traditionally crafted, and can be freely mixed and matched. Overall these inks are only moderately saturated, and have low water-resistance. The inks were specifically designed to work well with all types of paper, and all types of fountain pens. Being pastel-tinted, these inks have a watercolor-like appearance, and are not only fine inks for journaling, but are also really excellent inks for doodling & drawing. I only recently discovered them, and they are already the inks I gravitate towards for personal journaling. In this review the spotlight is on Yalumba, one of the ochre-type inks of the series. According to Wikipedia, "Yalumba" is an indigenous Australian word referring to "all the land around". And it must be said: the orangy ochre colour of this particular Callifolio ink reflects the mood of the dusty Australian outback. Yalumba has an orange-leaning ochre colour that looks quite nice. I like its looks, and find it especially suited for personal journaling. The ink is a bit unpredictable though, in that the colour you get depends heavily on the particular combination of pen and paper. Sometimes quite orangy, sometimes more ochre-brown leaning. Personally, I find this to be one of the charming characteristics of this ink. I found the ink to be a bit on the dry side in my Lamy Safari test pens, with lubrication being somewhat subpar. A wet pen solves this problem. Saturation is good though, even with finer nibs. The wetter your pen, the more the colour shifts from orange to brown ochre. Shading is subtle, and becomes more pronounced with broader nibs. The contrast between the light and darker parts of the text is just right, which makes it aesthetically pleasing. To show you the impact of saturation on the ink's look & feel on paper, I made some scribbles on Tomoe River where I really saturated portions of the paper with ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range. As you can see, this ink has a fairly wide colour span ranging from a light orange-ochre to a reasonably dark brown-ochre. On the smudge test - rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab - Yalumba behaved quite well. There is some smearing, but the text remains very sharp and readable. Water resistance is also quite good for a non-waterproof ink. An easily readable brownish residue remains even after longer exposures to water. This is also apparent from the lower part of the chromatography. I like this water resistance, since it means I can use this ink for notetaking at work (where this non-conventional colour is sure to draw some attention). I've tested the ink on a wide variety of paper - from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. My test-bank of papers has expanded to 20 different types, so you're sure to get a good impression of the ink's behaviour. 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 fountain pen The name of the paper used, written with a B-nib A small text sample, written with an M-nib Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib) Yalumba behaved perfectly on all the paper types, with no apparent feathering even on the lower quality papers in my test set. Even Moleskine paper behaved quite well with this ink! Drying times are mostly around the 5 to 10 second mark. The ink looks nice on both white and more yellowish paper. With this ink, paper makes a difference... the ink's look can differ significantly depending on the type of paper you use. At the end of the review, I show you the back-side of the different paper types, in the same order. With the low-end Moleskine there is prominent show-through and a bit of bleed-through. With the other papers, Yalumba's behaviour is impeccable. The ink copes really well with a wide variety of paper types. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. All samples were written with a Lamy Safari, which is typically a dry pen. I also added a visiting pen - a wet-writing Pelikan M400 Tortoiseshell Brown with a fine nib. With this wet nib, the ink writes much more pleasantly. It also shows a substantially darker line. Related inks To compare Yalumba 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. Inkxperiment – shadow people As a personal challenge, I try to create interesting drawings using only the ink I'm reviewing. For me, this brings extra fun to the hobby, and these little single-ink paintings are great for stretching my drawing skills. With these small pictures, I try to give you an idea of what the ink is capable of in a more artistic setting. For this drawing, I got my inspiration from some pictures I saw on Pinterest. I started off with HP Premium photo paper - which is rapidly becoming one of my favourite drawing media because it makes the ink look really vibrant. The lightly dotted background is obtained by soaking a kitchen towel in heavily water-diluted ink, and pressing the photo paper on top of it. The door frame and the shadow people were painted in using ever more saturated ink, ending with pure Yalumba for the darkest parts. The resulting picture gives you an idea of the colour range you can expect when using Yalumba as a drawing ink. Conclusion Callifolio Yalumba is an eye-pleasing orange-ochre ink, that is both at home with writing and drawing. The ink is at its best in wetter pens, where it produces a dark and saturated line, and where it doesn't suffer from the subpar lubrication you notice wih dry pens like the Lamy Safari. I especially liked Yalumba as a drawing ink, where its relatively broad colour spectrum is a big advantage. In my opinion, one of the nicer inks in the L’Artisan Pastellier Callifolio series. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Back-side of writing samples on different paper types