Borrowing a Platinum Century 3776 UEF for a few days. Good ink for it?

[A Smug Dill]

4 hours ago, PotbellyPig said:

If you have skill, you don’t need inks or really fine nibs.

 

You still need the right tools. There isn't much I can do with a HongDian no.32 (i.e. 32mm total length) steel EF nib, notwithstanding what @mke wrote:

 

  

6 hours ago, mke said:

Jowo 18k EF (0.3-0.35 mm?) is the upper limit. Hongdian EF (~0.25 mm?) is the optimum …

On 4/20/2022 at 7:42 PM, mke said:

My most favorable size lies between Western XXF and EF. That size is unfortunately only available with Hongdian EF pens.

 

This is the HongDian official store's product page on Taobao (aka TMall) for spare nibs:

https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=606372590262

 

There are no nibs listed with nominal widths of less than 0.4mm. Furthermore, if you look at HongDian's marketing collateral for its various pen models, while models that use no.26 nibs would generally specify EF as being 0.4mm, for models that use the larger no.32 nibs, EF is usually specified as 0.5mm. I have two model 960, three N1, two N1-S, two N6, and two N7 pens factory-fitted with no.32 EF nibs, and they all put down broader lines than the no.26 EF nibs found on models 1850, 6013, 517D, 525, A3, etc.

 

So, while I like the HongDian no.26 EF nibs (and also the no.26 mini ‘art‘ nibs) a lot, I certainly wouldn't make a general statement of endorsement for HongDian's EF nibs.

 

7 hours ago, PotbellyPig said:

I wonder how much better you could do with the Platinum UEF?  Like you wrote about reverse writing, probably not more than 19 lines in a box but with your skill, I could never hazard a guess.

 

I cannot do much better with the Platinum UEF; drawing 20 parallel lines in a 5mm-tall space is about the current limit of my hand-eye coordination. Not that it's impossible to improve upon it, but thus far there hasn't been much call for it. There just aren't that many pens that can be used to produce such fine lines; and pens that can put down 16 or 17 parallel lines comfortably is more than fine enough for my handwriting in whichever form.

 

 

Anyway, at some point you'll probably want to decide how bold you want the pen strokes to look, given a particular hanzi/kanji character size. Different types of scripts, and even variants within a particular type (e.g. kaishu), call for different ‘weights’.

[PotbellyPig]

2 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

You still need the right tools. There isn't much I can do with a HongDian no.32 (i.e. 32mm total length) steel EF nib, notwithstanding what @mke wrote:

 

  

 

This is the HongDian official store's product page on Taobao (aka TMall) for spare nibs:

https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=606372590262

 

There are no nibs listed with nominal widths of less than 0.4mm. Furthermore, if you look at HongDian's marketing collateral for its various pen models, while models that use no.26 nibs would generally specify EF as being 0.4mm, for models that use the larger no.32 nibs, EF is usually specified as 0.5mm. I have two model 960, three N1, two N1-S, two N6, and two N7 pens factory-fitted with no.32 EF nibs, and they all put down broader lines than the no.26 EF nibs found on models 1850, 6013, 517D, 525, A3, etc.

 

So, while I like the HongDian no.26 EF nibs (and also the no.26 mini ‘art‘ nibs) a lot, I certainly wouldn't make a general statement of endorsement for HongDian's EF nibs.

 

 

I cannot do much better with the Platinum UEF; drawing 20 parallel lines in a 5mm-tall space is about the current limit of my hand-eye coordination. Not that it's impossible to improve upon it, but thus far there hasn't been much call for it. There just aren't that many pens that can be used to produce such fine lines; and pens that can put down 16 or 17 parallel lines comfortably is more than fine enough for my handwriting in whichever form.

 

 

Anyway, at some point you'll probably want to decide how bold you want the pen strokes to look, given a particular hanzi/kanji character size. Different types of scripts, and even variants within a particular type (e.g. kaishu), call for different ‘weights’.

Just a question on your technique.  When you write the Chinese characters in the 5mm boxes, do you use quick strokes for the most part?  Is that what I should strive for to keep the lines thin in such as small space?  Thanks.  And thanks for the writing samples.

[A Smug Dill]

1 hour ago, PotbellyPig said:

When you write the Chinese characters in the 5mm boxes, do you use quick strokes for the most part?

 

No.

 

I cannot produce tome and hane with quick pen strokes. Maybe it's my lack of skill, or maybe it's just not possible physically without pausing.

[PotbellyPig]

1 hour ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

No.

 

I cannot produce tome and hane with quick pen strokes. Maybe it's my lack of skill, or maybe it's just not possible physically without pausing.

So it’s just a very light hand that keeps your strokes so distinct?  (No coagulating (pooling maybe is the word) of ink at intersections, etc.)?

[A Smug Dill]

13 hours ago, PotbellyPig said:

So it’s just a very light hand that keeps your strokes so distinct?

Light enough, but not that light. When I write 一, for example, there is a dip (and therefore not using a very light hand at that point) and almost-pause at the start, then I move quickly through the middle of the stroke, and then another dip-and-almost-pause at the end of the stroke to produce tome.

 

Maybe a demonstration would explain it better:

(click to play)

 

The pen I used for the above is a Sailor Profit Black Luster with a ‘large’ sized 21K gold F nib. It doesn't write nearly as finely as the other pens and nibs we discussed earlier, but I think it serves to illustrate the point even better.

 

Aside: The ink is Herbin Perle Noire… from a fill almost three years ago, back in May 2019! The converter is still at least half full, when I checked it just now. The cap seal effectiveness of the pen is astoundingly good! No hard starts, either.

 

13 hours ago, PotbellyPig said:

(No coagulating (pooling maybe is the word) of ink at intersections, etc.)?

 

It depends on the pen, ink, paper, and all that. When writing with inks that seem to be more ‘watery’ in terms of viscosity, and/or has long drying times, a subsequent pen stroke can or will draw still-wet ink that has pooled at the ends of earlier strokes when you put a line across them, eg. when writing 丰.

[PotbellyPig]

23 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

Maybe a demonstration would explain it better:

(click to play)

 

The pen I used for the above is a Sailor Profit Black Luster with a ‘large’ sized 21K gold F nib. It doesn't write nearly as finely as the other pens and nibs we discussed earlier, but I think it serves to illustrate the point even better.

Thank you for this.  That character for fog (at least that is what it represents in Japanese) has a decent number of strokes so it is a good practice candidate for me to try to write in a 5mm grid box.  I will try to mimic your technique.  I also just received the sample for Aurora Black and I found some Lamy Black ink cartridges so I will probably get to trying them out soon.

[arcfide]

On 4/28/2022 at 10:46 AM, A Smug Dill said:

The ink is Herbin Perle Noire

 

It's amazing how different some inks can look with broad and fine nibs! 

[A Smug Dill]

14 hours ago, PotbellyPig said:

That character for fog (at least that is what it represents in Japanese) has a decent number of strokes so it is a good practice candidate for me to try to write in a 5mm grid box.

 

I picked it out of the list of jōyō kanji as the example, on account of it:

1. being sufficiently complex but not overly so
2. not having different shinjitai and kyūjitai forms
3. being the same as it is written in traditional Chinese (in which it also means ‘fog‘, or alternatively ‘mist’)
4. having a variety of stroke types packed into the structure tightly, compared to, say, 韻 with mainly straight lines that can afford to touch each other
5. being something I can do with a pen with only the capability of putting down 13 distinct horizontal lines in a 5mm-tall space
6. being in the name of a Pilot Iroshizuku ink colour

I can think of some other 19-stroke kanji that are rather challenging to write in a tight space:

• 璽 with the tiny crosses being very apt to cause ink to pool and spread to touch the pillars of the frame around them
• 警 in not letting the closed counter spaces (inside 口 and 攵) get filled up
• 麗 is actually difficult to write beautifully because of the top part, trying not to let the 丶 touch the 冂 frames, while without making it so tall to take up half of the character's height

 

14 hours ago, PotbellyPig said:

I will try to mimic your technique.

 

Oh, you flatter me. Thank you. I think you should look for better exemplars, though. Have you seen this?

 

[A Smug Dill]

I saw this today, and thought it was pretty good, in terms of the technique you could ‘mimic’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qe2JFMmKzA

 

Even though he only used rollerball and gel pens, they do write readily and wetly with no or minimal downward pressure; and their points are not specially shaped to produce Asian calligraphic writing. Furthermore, while he wrote inside large squares, the ratio between stroke thickness and the characters' em-square height (and thus width too) is not that different from writing inside a 5mm square with a Japanese EF or UEF nib. Therefore I think the technique shown is transferrable to your use case; just scale down the length and breadth of each stroke by half, but aim to write at the same speed (or slower, if required to achieve the necessary precision).

[PotbellyPig]

4 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

I saw this today, and thought it was pretty good, in terms of the technique you could ‘mimic’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qe2JFMmKzA

 

Even though he only used rollerball and gel pens, they do write readily and wetly with no or minimal downward pressure; and their points are not specially shaped to produce Asian calligraphic writing. Furthermore, while he wrote inside large squares, the ratio between stroke thickness and the characters' em-square height (and thus width too) is not that different from writing inside a 5mm square with a Japanese EF or UEF nib. Therefore I think the technique shown is transferrable to your use case; just scale down the length and breadth of each stroke by half, but aim to write at the same speed (or slower, if required to achieve the necessary precision).

Thanks!  This is the first of its type I have seen in English.  I have been following some Japanese calligraphers who post similar things on YouTube.  It’s really amazing the flourishes you can get with a thicker gel pen.  Calligrapher Takumi is the most popular one I follow (he has a book out too) and he recommends a 1.0 mm gel pen.  If you go that thick, I don’t know how many advantages a broad or double broad fountain pen has over it.  At smaller thicknesses, it looks like you can get more flourishes out of a fountain pen because of the tip shape, wetness, etc..  My thickest fountain pen is a Japanese medium so about 0.5 mm so I can’t be certain about broader sizes and if my theory is correct.  With a 0.5mm fountain pen you can get a lot of expressiveness while the gel pen decreases rapidly as you get smaller in point width.

[arcfide]

5 hours ago, PotbellyPig said:

 If you go that thick, I don’t know how many advantages a broad or double broad fountain pen has over it.

 

With Sailor's Naginata Togi or Zoom nibs, there's a lot of room for variation and adjustment if you're willing to go with lines that wet and large. Same with the Music nibs. Even the pretty "round" tipped Platinum Coarse nib would give you a lot of range on your strokes that might be more challenging to mimic with even a large gel ballpoint pen. I've found that you can be extremely expressive even with simple ball tipped broad nibs in most fountain pens with the right ink and technique. 

[PotbellyPig]

50 minutes ago, arcfide said:

 

With Sailor's Naginata Togi or Zoom nibs, there's a lot of room for variation and adjustment if you're willing to go with lines that wet and large. Same with the Music nibs. Even the pretty "round" tipped Platinum Coarse nib would give you a lot of range on your strokes that might be more challenging to mimic with even a large gel ballpoint pen. I've found that you can be extremely expressive even with simple ball tipped broad nibs in most fountain pens with the right ink and technique. 

That makes sense.  It’s just that the 1.0mm gel pen is pretty good for Asian character flourishes in itself.  But I guess a broad fountain pen can do even better.  Especially if it is something like a Togi grind which specializes in kanji strokes.  I have a few gel ink pens and the broader ones are pretty good at writing kanji.  The finer ones don’t show that much in terms of flourishes.  But it is still better than a ballpoint pen.

[PotbellyPig]

As an update to the original topic about the ink for a Platinum UEF.  Due to some writing samples I saw and recommendations, I loaded the UEF with Aurora Black.  It previously was loaded with Kiwa-guro.  I unfortunately didn’t mark my writings before as to which were made with the UEF with Kiwa-guro so I can’t make a direct comparison.  But from what I can remember and see now, if I apply very little to no pressure to the pen with Aurora Black, the line produced is a hairline with the UEF.  Even more so than with the Kiwa-guro ink.  I am not imagining things because someone posted as a reply to an ink review on the web that the Aurora Black has some property that allows it to produce very fine lines when you use little pressure and quick strokes with EF nibs.  It may be a little dryer than Kiwa-guro but I am not sure if that is the reason.  It is supposed to be lubricating but I am not sure about the degree of wetness.  Anyway, I am a bit more satisfied with the pen now.  Next I will probably try some Lamy black ink but I didn’t notice tremendous differences when I loaded Lamy black into a Pilot steel nib EF pen.

 

Edit:  I filled an empty cartridge with the Aurora Black and it took a tremendously long time until the UEF nib section got saturated.  I don’t know if that means anything.

[A Smug Dill]

The out-of-the-box fineness of Diplomat's size #6 steel EF nibs (made by JoWo) consistently rivals that of Japanese EF nibs:

[PotbellyPig]

On 4/27/2022 at 6:20 PM, A Smug Dill said:

When I put Sailor Kiwaguro in my Pilot Capless black ion-plated EF nib (which writes more dryly than its gold- and silver-coloured kin), the lines were so narrow that it wasn't really useful for writing on 5mm–6mm horizontal ruled lines.

This caught my interest.  I am going to see if I can get my hands on a Matte Black Vanishing Point with that black ion-plated gold nib and try Kiwaguro with it.  Thanks for bringing this up.

[PotbellyPig]

On 4/27/2022 at 6:20 PM, A Smug Dill said:

When I put Sailor Kiwaguro in my Pilot Capless black ion-plated EF nib (which writes more dryly than its gold- and silver-coloured kin), the lines were so narrow that it wasn't really useful for writing on 5mm–6mm horizontal ruled lines.

I just tested this out myself.  It is indeed a real fine line.  The Pilot black ion-plated EF puts down less ink than the Platinum UEF.  So it seems even finer.  Is it because of the plating?  I wonder if a gold or rhodium finished nib would behave the same.

[A Smug Dill]

2 hours ago, PotbellyPig said:

So it seems even finer.  Is it because of the plating?

 

In my experience across multiple brands, it does appear that a black coating — whether it's Pilot's “black ion-plating”, Aurora's matt ruthenium plating on steel and gold nibs, Lamy's PVD coating on Z52 nibs — over the nib slit correlates with drier writing performance compared to the same type of nib that is not black-coated.

 

[PotbellyPig]

1 hour ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

In my experience across multiple brands, it does appear that a black coating — whether it's Pilot's “black ion-plating”, Aurora's matt ruthenium plating on steel and gold nibs, Lamy's PVD coating on Z52 nibs — over the nib slit correlates with drier writing performance compared to the same type of nib that is not black-coated.

 

Very interesting.  This is the finest writing from a standard nib I’ve seen so far.  The Kiwa-Guro ink seems to have a lot to do with it too.  It’s strange that with the Platinum UEF, I achieved relatively finer results with the Aurora Black ink though.  I guess you can’t completely generalize how an ink will behave.  The nib construction has a lot to do with it as well.  Seems like even the plating has an effect from what you have observed.   But the Kiwa-Guro seems to be a winner to use in EF nibs in general.

[A Smug Dill]

On 4/28/2022 at 1:01 PM, PotbellyPig said:

I wonder how much better you could do with the Platinum UEF?