Taccia Hokusai Katsushika Fukaki Hanada (Light Blue)

April 14, 2020

This is the third review of the four Hokusai Katsushika inks from Taccia/Nakabayashi that have reached American shores. I didn't know what to expect with this ink. Would "Light Blue" mean a lighter, brighter color, more like a turquoise? Would it simply mean "not dark"? The truth of the matter is closer to the latter than the former. In a dry pen this will be more of a pastel, light blue. Very readable, with excellent shading. In a wetter pen the shading is still there, in a greater range of values (light-dark), and a bit more saturation. But I'll admit that I wasn't delighted by this ink like I was with the other three inks in the series. It could have been the pen didn't work well with this ink even though it wrote perfectly fine. But it is an ink that I had to nudge the converter down to remove air from the converter. It seemed I had to do that more with this ink in this pen than others, so it could very well be the two just didn't get along as well as one would like. Neither one's fault really, just not very compatible.

The ink really has no showthrough or bleedthrough issues on the absorbent (but good quality) Mohawk via Linen paper. Inks never sheen on this paper (well the Rust Green did). Dries pretty fast comparatively. The blue leans towards green, but I don't think enough to be called teal. Closer to Cerulean I think.

You can really go over how the ink looks in this image. The first part of the text is with a normal feed. Towards the end you can see where I nudged it pushed more ink into the feed and the line got noticeably darker.

I don't know if these are limited edition. But this is the only ink of the Hokusai series currently in stock at Anderson Pens.