Gouletpens.com 'swab Shop'

[GouletPens]

As I started carrying more and more inks, they became harder to tell which colors were which, and how they compared to each other. I thought doing swabs would be helpful, so my wife and I built the 'Swab Shop', which shows ink swabs and glass pen writing I did for all 160+ colors we have on both white and ivory 210g Clairefontaine Pollen cardstock. It was a TON of work over the last 6 weeks to set it up (that's why I watermarked them), especially when it came to color profiling and adjusting everything to get accurate colors. I didn't just scan and throw them up there, I had a professional photographer edit all of the colors to get them as accurate as was within my capabilities. Hopefully this will be a useful tool for everyone to use, and it'll help you to at a minimum compare inks that you have in use to others that you were curious about. Let me know what you think!

 

 

Goulet Pen Co. Swab Shop

[Yuki Onitsura]

That's absolutely fantastic, Brian. Bravo, good sir!

 

Yuki

[GouletPens]

Why thank you! And I'll surely be adding additional ink colors as I expand too. Noodler's is on my radar next, I think.

[Scriptorium Pens]

What an incredible gift to the fountain pen world! Thank you!!!

[GouletPens]

What an incredible gift to the fountain pen world! Thank you!!!

You're welcome! I almost went CRAZY with all of the color-profiling, but it was well worth it. I feel confident about the accuracy of the colors, at least as much as you can with the physical limitations of computer monitors!! Hopefully others will find this tool useful as well.

[USMCMom]

Outstanding!! This is exactly what I had wished someone would do ... glad YOU did it!

[Spitzner]

Another example of outstanding Goulet service! Kudos!!!

 

Pam

[OrchidUnicorn]

WOW! AND Oh no!! This is great but now I know I will "need" more ink!!

 

Lashelle

[GouletPens]

WOW! AND Oh no!! This is great but now I know I will "need" more ink!!

 

Lashelle

Thus you've fallen into my trap, muhahaha! :roflmho: No seriously though, I wanted to make this available to everyone whether you want to buy ink or not. Feel free to share the swabs too...that's why I watermarked the images, so I would still get 'credit' for all of the work I did, but everyone gets to benefit from the cool swabs!

[razr]

Great idea Brian!

[HistoryNerd]

And this is exactly why I'm sending my friends and family to the Goulet Pens website, so they can do all their Christmas shopping. Once Noodler's is available, I'll have no reason to go anywhere else for my inks! Especially since I can see samples, get samples, and the buy what I fancy!

 

Thanks for all the hard work that went into all those swabs!

[Alice L]

This is great, Brian! You've given us a very useful tool, and we really do appreciate it!

 

You put a lot of yourself into this project, and I think you'll get a lot back out of it: now that we can play with the possibilities I have this funny feeling that I really don't have quite all the colors of ink that I might like to have :hmm1: (sound of funds moving out of my account, and packages of ink arriving on my doorstep)

[desertsquid]

Wow, great job, Brian! This is a really useful resource and I really like the idea of having swabs of each ink on two types of paper.

[thesolaris]

This is fantastic Brian!

[D.C. in PA]

Wonderful idea, Brian. I'm sure we all appreciate the extra effort (and expense) involved in your verification of the colors via the professional photographer, minimizing computer color 'drift'.

By the way, I'm looking forward to meeting you and visiting your tables at the Washington show.

D.C.

[tanalasta]

And that's why I choose Brian as my ink supplier of choice...

 

Mind you, I'll admit I've only ordered J'Herbin inks from him (do you want to stock Iroshizuku at a reasonable price?) and my last order was some time ago but that's because I have so much ink!

 

He puts a lot of work into his store and customer satisfaction. I wish you all the best in your endeavours.

 

Oh, and I'll put in a plug that he gives a discount to FPN members and we worked out we could fit 4 J'Herbin bottles in a USPS flat-rate priority box to arrive safely to Australia

 

Website very happily bookmarked in my favourites.

Edited July 11, 2010 by tanalasta

[Triplet Mom]

Brian, that is BRILLIANT! What a profoundly useful tool for deciding on ink colors. How do you find time for stuff like this with a newborn??? You are amazing!

 

Warm regards,

Lynne

[vlada]

This is fenomenal !

Thanks for the effort and time spent on creating this ink swab database

[GouletPens]

And that's why I choose Brian as my ink supplier of choice...

 

Mind you, I'll admit I've only ordered J'Herbin inks from him (do you want to stock Iroshizuku at a reasonable price?) and my last order was some time ago but that's because I have so much ink!

 

He puts a lot of work into his store and customer satisfaction. I wish you all the best in your endeavours.

 

Oh, and I'll put in a plug that he gives a discount to FPN members and we worked out we could fit 4 J'Herbin bottles in a USPS flat-rate priority box to arrive safely to Australia

 

Website very happily bookmarked in my favourites.

 

Actually, I've since found a way to better package inks overseas....if you get J. Herbin inks and only those (no paper or anything) I can fit 12 bottles in a small box inside the USPS flat-rate envelope. That's 12 bottles of J. Herbin shipped for $13.45 (not including the price of the ink of course!).

 

About Iro ink, I contacted Pilot a while back about carrying their ink (this was before the price increase) and never received a response. I've been told by rumors that Pilot only likes to deal with bigger companies, so maybe I'm not on their radar yet. I'll keep working on them though. Don't worry, eventually I want to carry everything....I mean everything!

 

Brian, that is BRILLIANT! What a profoundly useful tool for deciding on ink colors. How do you find time for stuff like this with a newborn??? You are amazing!

 

Warm regards,

Lynne

 

Where do I find the time? I basically eat sleep and breathe paper and ink! I get around 5 hours of sleep a night, give or take an hour or so. My son (now almost 6 months, hard to believe!!) demands a lot of time but my wife and I take turns, each working when the other is watching him. I basically work on packing orders, correspondence, and day-to-day business stuff throughout the day, and once my son is in bed, that's when I get to work on the 'extra' stuff like these swabs. I do it day in and day out, weekends, holidays, every day. But it's easy because I love it! It doesn't feel like work, really. Like a professor of mine said in college, "If you find a job you love you'll never 'work' another day in your life!"

[sombrueil]

This is bad news. I thought I had enough inks. Obviously, I was seriously misinformed.

 

Order forthcoming.