Yama - Budo - Pilot Iroshizuku

[BastardSecretary]

I too love the amazing yellow gold sheen on Yama Budo. Looking at the bottom of the bottle, I don't see any sediment at all - the gold seems to be held in suspension. On the page, the gold drifts to the edges and concentrated spots, looking burnished instead of particulate. No sparkly-arklies like you get with the Diamine shimmertastics. I suppose it's more 'tasteful'. How do they do that, stop it from settling out? With a generous application on very good paper, it reminds me a lot of R&K Solferino, with gold where the green is on the Solferino. But the purple is more muted on the Yama Budo, which is a pity. I think I'll mix the two, maybe get the best of both worlds.

[siamackz]

It is the perfect ink in my platinum 3776 Bourgogne!

[kronos77]

So what does this ink look like after a bit of time? Does it change color or just lose some vibrancy?

[visvamitra]

In my experience it tends to fade and looses vibrancy. It's cool ink to write fresh text but after few months on some papers (especially absorbent ones) it will fade.

[chromantic]

I too love the amazing yellow gold sheen on Yama Budo. Looking at the bottom of the bottle, I don't see any sediment at all - the gold seems to be held in suspension. On the page, the gold drifts to the edges and concentrated spots, looking burnished instead of particulate. No sparkly-arklies like you get with the Diamine shimmertastics. I suppose it's more 'tasteful'. How do they do that, stop it from settling out?

 

Sheen is an optical effect, that's why you can't see sparkly particulates in the bottle.

 

Ink formulations are a mix of different dyes. On absorbent paper, the whole mix is absorbed into the surface of the paper, creating the uniform color that you see in the bottle. On non-absorbent paper, the ink pools and the individual components separate into layers which act like glazes, each layer alters the color of light coming up from below.

 

edit to add: This is just my understanding of how it works.

Edited January 20, 2017 by chromantic

[Ontha1two]

I'm having a hard time getting any sheen from my bottle of Yama buda. Shades nicely on certain papers though. Any recommendations for shading and sheeningbin one ink?

[chromantic]

I'm having a hard time getting any sheen from my bottle of Yama buda. Shades nicely on certain papers though. Any recommendations for shading and sheeningbin one ink?

 

Waterman Inspired Blue or Sheaffer Skrip Turquoise; both shade on good paper but the Skrip shades better on copy, both have red/pink sheen on good paper but the Inspired is more obvious, while the Skrip is more elusive.

 

You can rarely see sheen straight on, you have to hold the paper so the light reflects off it at an angle to see it.

[Uncial]

If you want Yama Budo to sheen like no other ink on earth, take a small bit of it, put it in a vial without a lid and place it in an area where there are unlikely to be active yeasts and stuff in the air (i.e., not in the kitchen). Leave it for 24-48 hours and then fill your pen. Sheenorama!

[888007888]

If you want Yama Budo to sheen like no other ink on earth, take a small bit of it, put it in a vial without a lid and place it in an area where there are unlikely to be active yeasts and stuff in the air (i.e., not in the kitchen). Leave it for 24-48 hours and then fill your pen. Sheenorama!

Interesting. I'm going to try this today.

[andrewnielsen]

Do you ever get the feeling that you've been ripped off?

 

This ink is EXACTLY the same colour as magenta ink plus some black ink. They no more looked at a wild grape as flew to the moon. I must say, that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I would have hoped that there was some something to this ink. It's just two aniline dyes plus normal fountain pen stuff, as far as I can tell.

[ManofKent]

Do you ever get the feeling that you've been ripped off?

 

This ink is EXACTLY the same colour as magenta ink plus some black ink. They no more looked at a wild grape as flew to the moon. I must say, that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I would have hoped that there was some something to this ink. It's just two aniline dyes plus normal fountain pen stuff, as far as I can tell.

 

What do you expect an ink to be like?

 

It flows well, has excellent nib lubrication, is strongly saturated, shows nice shading and has one of the best sheens of any ink. Oh, and it comes in a nice bottle

 

Yes ink is expensive (although buy Iroshizuku in Japan and it's not exceptionally dear for ink), but compare it to the cost of my wife's Chanel no.5 which is just oils in alcohol and ink looks positively cheap

[Chrissy]

 

What do you expect an ink to be like?

 

It flows well, has excellent nib lubrication, is strongly saturated, shows nice shading and has one of the best sheens of any ink. Oh, and it comes in a nice bottle

 

Yes ink is expensive (although buy Iroshizuku in Japan and it's not exceptionally dear for ink), but compare it to the cost of my wife's Chanel no.5 which is just oils in alcohol and ink looks positively cheap

 

+1 for this

[Jan2016]

+1

[Honeybadgers]

I'm having a hard time getting any sheen from my bottle of Yama buda. Shades nicely on certain papers though. Any recommendations for shading and sheeningbin one ink?

 

 

Yama budo is a nice ink, but it doesn't sheen as hard as many people say. And i find it to behave intolerably on cheap copy paper.

 

I find waterman serenity blue to sheen well, sailor oku yama sheens HARD gold from a deep red base, Sailor souten sheens deep red, and sailor yama-dori sheens heavy red.

Edited June 15, 2017 by Honeybadgers

[Aquaria]

Do you ever get the feeling that you've been ripped off?

 

This ink is EXACTLY the same colour as magenta ink plus some black ink. They no more looked at a wild grape as flew to the moon. I must say, that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I would have hoped that there was some something to this ink. It's just two aniline dyes plus normal fountain pen stuff, as far as I can tell.

 

Funny, Yama-Budo looks very much like one of the shade variations of Kyoho grapes, aka Japanese mountain grapes, which are the very grapes this color is based on:

Edited July 8, 2018 by Aquaria

[pen_master]

This ink has possibly the best 'feel' out of all the inks I own and is very wet. I wish all inks behaved this way.

[inkstainedruth]

@ andrewnielsen -- Yes, in some respects Yama-budo is very similar to the original formula of Noodler's Black Swan in Australian Roses -- which is WAY less expensive. But I found the color JUST ENOUGH different to be happy I have bottles of both inks. And frankly, in some nibs De Atramentis Red Roses is also similar, and *that* ink has a lovely rose scent to it as an added bonus.

And no, I don't recall it ever getting sheen. Doesn't make me like it any less. And no, it's not particularly water resistant either -- but I've got other inks (not necessarily in that color family, but I'm sure that they're out there) that MEET that need.

If you bought a bottle of Yama-budo and decided that it's not for you, trust me -- there are plenty of people on FPN who would be more than happy to relieve you of the burden of owning it (and I'm not even including myself, because I have a backup bottle when the first one gets emptied out....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

ETA: There are inks I can't stand, too -- and for various reasons. There are inks everyone out there will say they can't stand. I gave away a (free to me originally) almost full bottle of Platinum Mix-Free Flame Red to someone because I thought the color was hideous -- if you're old enough to remember Mecurachrome, think THAT color). Josh is a college professor and uses red inks for grading. He then gave it away to my friend Karl. Dunno if Karl still has it or gave it away to someone else....

​Everyone likes something different. Amberlea Davis goes for retina-searing. Cyber6 never met a murky green she didn't like. Sandy1 is the self-professed Queen of Blue-blacks. And me? I'm all over the map, though I probably have more blue, blue-black and purple inks than anything else, and am extremely fussy about greens, browns and reds.

Edited July 14, 2018 by inkstainedruth

[A Smug Dill]

@inkstainedruth I find De Atramentis Red Roses much redder than Iroshizuku yama-budo in natural light, but under artificial light from LEDs they indeed seem similar:

 

 

 

 

I can also see that yama-budo can darken to a brownish colour, although I'm not sure how much of it is due to evaporation – I filled my Platinum Izumo with it a several weeks ago, but only write with it a tiny little bit every few days, whereas I filled the Sailor only this morning after a thorough cleaning – and how much of it is due to a fine nib laying ink in a more concentrated manner than a broader nib. In some of the writing samples (I chucked out), writing fairly complex glyphs inside 5mm squares with the tip of the Concord nib make the result seem more brown in colour to my eye, than writing simpler glyphs in larger format with the reverse of the nib.

 

I can also never judge what counts as a lot of shading from an ink, and my usual handwriting is too small to see it anyway. I've blown up the following part of the scan, in which the glyphs have relatively few cross-strokes and hence largely avoided spots where ink has been laid twice:

 

 

Does that count as a moderate amount of shading?

 

As for sheen, I don't think I've ever seen sheen when I write (with almost exclusively EF, F and SF nibs), irrespective of the ink. I just flipped through my stack of sample cards; nada.

[luxseeker]

I have a section in a notebook where I was using this ink back and forth with another color over a few days. There are initially paragraphs with no sheen, then later a few with a nice gold sheen (which pleasantly surprised me) and then another where it even looks very light (unpleasant surprise).

 

In this case, the sheen appeared after the ink was in the pen a few days. That was with a European fine nib.

Edited August 17, 2018 by luxseeker

[Bexinthecity247]

I have just bought this ink (on blind faith - before I saw the review) and I am so glad I did can't wait for its arrival.