Sepia Toned Ink Comparison - 32 Inks

[Mauricio]

 

Written with a Conklin Crescent 20 gold-filled overlay, fitted with a wet noodle nib. Ink is Diamine Golden Brown.

Have to get the Private Reserve Sepia ink now. What a lovely color with great shading.

[dcpritch]

Thanks Mauricio! Next time I think I'll ask if you could help with the writing samples, they would look 1000 times better than mine.

[drifting]

Fantastic work, truly appreciated.

 

Too bad about your Cacao du Brésil: I once had a bottle of Bouquet D'Antan, of all things, arrive decayed into the same grey. It happens with Herbin, occasionally.

 

I'd put money on the Stipula Sepia really being Verde Muschiato: if you look back at the scan jbn10161 pointed you to, the VM is there, and it looks pretty close to your 'Sepia' to me. Closer to that than to the Stipula Sepia in girlieg33k's scan. The problem with the Stipula bottles is that they aren't labelled with the ink names, they just have a hand painted drop of the colour: it makes it hard to remember which is which.

 

Wow. I'm just trying to gauge how much time this must have taken you. It's right up there with Wim's mega brown comparison! Thanks again!

 

Ryan.

 

ETA: remembering that I've got this ink (Stipula Sepia), but I'm pretty sure it's properly called Terra di Sienna.

 

R.

Edited December 8, 2011 by drifting

[Jared]

What an excellent review! This is now one of my very favorites.

[Uncle Red]

Great work DCPritch; I really appreciate it.

 

I've long enjoyed PR Sepia from my Esterbrook Stub. I need a new bottle.

 

You get a little less color variation out of Diamine Raw Sienna than I do. A dry nib makes it look like I dipped a pen in red wine and a wetter pen looks red-brown.

[dcpritch]

Well I've resolved the J. Herbin Cacao du Bresil mystery. The fine folks at Exaclair/Quo Vadis in New York sent a replacement bottle of CdB after I emailed them a copy of the scan shown above. The new ink is the color CdB is supposed to be, shown below - swabs done on 25% rag content paper. They believe my initial bottle was from a "bad batch", and were very gracious in replacing it with a bottle of correctly colored ink. Yay! This scan shows that CdB is more clearly within the sepia tones shown at the top of this thread.

 

 

I am still waiting to resolve the issue I had with Stipula Sepia and, assuming that resolves the way I think it will, I will hopefully amend the images at the beginning of this thread, and in the Part 2 thread, to show the correct colors.

 

Edited to add - Thanks for all the really nice comments from everyone. I am still working on this to be sure it is as accurate as possible.

Edited December 19, 2011 by dcpritch

[geoduc]

I am still waiting to resolve the issue I had with Stipula Sepia and, assuming that resolves the way I think it will, I will hopefully amend the images at the beginning of this thread, and in the Part 2 thread, to show the correct colors.

 

 

David sent me a sample of the ink that was presented as Stipula Sepia in his review for comparison with my bottle of Verde Muschiato. It looks like they're one and the same to me:

[wnclee]

I, nor anyone else could have asked for ANY MORE COMPLETE a review of sepia or any other tones than this...Thank you so much for your supreme effort...Sincerely and fondly, wncl [LeRoy W. Lee]

[ChuckClark]

Thank you for what you have provided. The sepia and browns are my most fav colors.Book marking this page will provide drooling material for future purchases

Thanks

[someonesdad]

This is excellent work and few people realize the effort it takes in planning it and the boring cleaning of the pens! It ranks up there with a Sandy1 evaluation and that's no mean feat.

 

To me, sepia only means one color, that of what was commonly called sepia paper for engineering drawings. It allowed you to make a copy of a blueline and modify it and erase it. We used it a lot in the days before CAD became available.

[fourseamer]

Thank you, dcpritch, for the comprehensive review! I have grown to love brown and sepia inks lately, and I see several I'd like to add to my ink cache.

 

On a semi-related note, the first time I learned about the color sepia was while watching MTV. Yes, that MTV. They were about to air Rod Stewart & Jeff Beck's video for "People Get Ready," and the veejay explained how the director used a sepia filter to create the antique photograph motif. Very cool. Every time I see mention of sepia, I think of that video:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO12vZpeITY

[SamCapote]

Thank you, dcpritch, for the comprehensive review! I have grown to love brown and sepia inks lately, and I see several I'd like to add to my ink cache.

 

On a semi-related note, the first time I learned about the color sepia was while watching MTV. Yes, that MTV. They were about to air Rod Stewart & Jeff Beck's video for "People Get Ready," and the veejay explained how the director used a sepia filter to create the antique photograph motif. Very cool. Every time I see mention of sepia, I think of that video:

 

That is a fabulous example of sepia and the effect it can have. Never saw that video before.

 

I continue to enjoy this fabulous review, coming back to it many times.

Edited January 1, 2012 by SamCapote

[JimB]

I loved the look of PR Sepia in this review and immediately bought a bottle. As soon as it arrived I filled a Pelikan 400NN F with it; I found it too light so I immediately emptied it. I next filled a Lamy AL Star 1.1 nib and it writes dry. I mean, DRY! Lots of skipping. Very little shading for me on any paper. I have to flush it soon. Next up, my flexy Ahab. First half page using this combo, wonderful stuff. But again, it started skipping. Then the ink flow stopped. I pushed the plunger and wet the nib. Good for a paragraph, then the same issues! I know the Ahab is adjusted well for other inks! And I had just flushed BSiAR from the Ahab, it had been doing well all week, never drying out even after days, never skipping.

 

In short, my personal evaluation of Private Reserve Sepia is that, while I absolutely love the shading it can get, it's an impossible to use this particular ink for me. My next step in desperation will be to add a surfactant to a small vial of this ink and see if it flows any better.

 

Am I alone in this? Could it be a bad bottle?

[dcpritch]

I loved the look of PR Sepia in this review ...

Am I alone in this? Could it be a bad bottle?

 

I only had a sample of this and did not more than a single converter, so I cannot really judge. Perhaps others have more experience. I agree about the wonderful shading characteristics of this ink, but if it has unreliable flow that would definitely be a drawback. Makes me wonder if the great shading quality is achieved with a trade-off in flow, but I'm not enough of an ink expert to offer anything more than conjecture on that question.

[JimB]

I added some amount of both water and about three drops of dish washing liquid to my almost 2/3 full ink bottle and it flows just fine now. I'll use it until it's gone, then next time I'll leave out the extra water and add just the soap, because it seems to have lost some of its shading, but not too much.

[Laura N]

So glad to see this thread is still going. Two quick observations:

 

1. I had a sample of J. Herbin Cacao de Brasil sometime this fall that looked exactly like the gray ink in David's test. The same light gray. I thought: yuck. But I assumed it was just one of those inks that looks different when you get it in your own pens. Since I only bought a sample, I suspect that it's not worth it it to notify the distributor. But his is not a one-off problem.

 

2. I just got a sample of Private Reserve Sepia this weekend. I had the same terrible flow problems as Januaryman. I am glad to hear the dishwashing soap trick. But I personally may just stick with J. Herbin Lie de Thé, which I already own. The Lie de Thé is darker, but has a very similar tone to my eye.

[Avetikus]

I'll be picking up a bottle of Yama-Guri soon. I really like the look of that brown/grey.

 

This review is incredibly helpful. Thanks again!

[SamCapote]

Just appreciating this work as I look at it again tonight.

[kayakjax]

Thank you VERY much for this obvious labor of love!

 

I'm just getting back into pens, and just joined the forum yesterday.

 

I have some nice ivory colored paper that I've been dying to try brown ink on. I went first thing today to the Ink Reviews looking for an opinion on a nice brown when I found this. Wow!

 

Just looking at various sites, I had my choices narrowed down to about three, but wasn't sure at all.

 

Now, I'm up to about four, but after your test, I know they're what I want (and are different enough for me to justify buying them all).

 

You are my hero!

[dcpritch]

Thanks KJ for the very kind words and, wait ...

 

Welcome to FPN!

 

I love it when I can use that emoticon thingy. We are glad to have you here and I'm certainly glad you were able to enjoy and make use of the sepia comparison I put together. You will find a startling number of gifted people on this network, all of them madly enamored of anachronistic writing instruments, a great many of whom contribute enormously to furthering the understanding and learning of others. I hope you will become a regular here and that we can learn from you, as well.

 

Cheers,

 

DAVID