Pelikan Ink Mixing

[Vipersdad]

I would like to add some 4001 Brilliant Black to my 4001 Royal Blue.  Does anyone have a ratio they like?  In the past I have added Waterman Blue/Black to my Waterman Green to create a nice Hunter Green.  

 

Thank you.

 

V.

[Bo Bo Olson]

Some 15 years ago i tried to make a BB with half and half and ended up with a dull blue. Buy the real  BB if you can. have it sent in from Canada or England. In it is "illegal" to sell in the States. Or so many told me. I live in Germany and can buy it at any time.

 

Edelsteine Tanzinite is the Pelikan upper class BB. Edelstein just slipped over €20 limit of mine....but 4001 BB is still very affordable.

[InesF]

Hi @Vipersdad.

Like @Bo Bo Olson, so did I in the past. 4001 Royal Blue is a strong acidic and 4001 Black is a neutral ink. Although no strange reaction occurs immediately, the mixture shortens the lifetime of the written lines. In my case, a 3 Blue + 1 Black resulted in a nice BlueBlack that lost all its blue after ca. 10-12 years on paper. Pure 4001 Blue did not.

 

As Bo Bo Olson mentioned, better to buy a real blue-black, such as the 4001 one or the Edelstein Tanzanite or the Aurora BB or the deAtramentis Sherlock or ... there are so many.

[Vipersdad]

Thank you.

[Bo Bo Olson]

IMO nib wise the Golden age of fountain Pens died in 1970.

The Golden Age of Paper died unnoticed in the '80's.

 

We are how ever living in The Golden Age of Inks....so many slightly different colors and hues; from so many companies. Reading the ink reviews will end up saving your liver.

[stric75]

I have a bit too much of Pelikan 4001 koenigsblau and brilliant schwartz ink and I've tried mixing them up with a different rate of success. Currently I have a mix of 7 parts keonigsblau and 1 part brilliant schwartz and the color is an okay shade of dull blue; it's missing the vibrance of koenigsblau (if that ink can be called vibrant at all).  Interestingly, it's not that dark as I was hoping to achieve. While the color is a different shade of blue, it's not necessarily richer/darker; it looks watered down. 

Earlier I've made a darker mix with about 1/4-1/3 black and the rest was blue (both were Pelikan 4001 inks), and that turned out to look nice in the bottle (a lovely shade of dark blue), but once the ink was on paper, it turned quickly into a dull, dark gray; very little of blue shade stayed. As @InesF indicated, the blue tends to disappear from the paper, and in my case in less than a year, everything I wrote with this mix became dark, dull gray. 

At some point I did try to make a dark purple, by mixing Pelikan 4001 black, royal blue and red, and I noticed strange foaming in the mix; while the red mixed fine with blue and produced a very vibrant purple, the moment the black was added, some foam formed in the bottle, and I stopped messing with Pelikan's reds and blacks.

If you have a lot of ink to experiment with, feel free to make different ratios and see what you like the best. But if you want a truly rich, deep dark blue, then the best is to buy a bottle of it. So many choices are out there to choose from.

[Bo Bo Olson]

I tried something similar 15 years ago in a vain attempt to be blue-black. I was not as exacting as you.

It was dull and I had no idea what a blue-black really was.

 

How any bottles of Royal Blue do you have?

 

You can put them away and in 5-7-10 years and they will still be good.

I suggest buying 4001 blue-black or Pelikan Edelstein Tanzanite to get the blue-black you are looking for.

 

There are ever so many good blue blacks, from Waterman to ESSR. ESSR a blue black that depending on the paper will change from blue to black while you write to taking three days to make the change. Depending on the paper, I did a 17 paper test of that ink, that got lost on Randsom Bucket.

Richard Binder in his site, says any good blue-black will make a change, perhaps in a day for blue to a blackened blue. I suggest taking a look at ESSR, it had one of the longest threads on this com's history on one thing.

Our passed ink guru, Sandy 1, called it mischievous, I called it sneaky.

 

I have 5 or so BB's remaining, and I was never into BB. However, I do highly recommend ESSR, it was rated by folks back then as better than Diamine Register Ink. 110ml bottle for then €12....don't know what it is now.

Unfortunately, it has no chemicals in it, so is only good for some two years.

 

[davisgt]

Mixing inks has always been a fun pastime on here. Lots of recipes in multiple posts. Two of my favorites: Binder Burgundy and Blurple. Simple mixture that resulted in, to my mind anyway,  brilliant inks that I used over and over again.  I'm definitely going to try the Hunter Green you mentioned above.  Hunter Green is one of my favorite colors.  What was the proportion you used Vipersdad?

[Chris1]

ESS Registrar' Ink - currently £12.50 for 110ml, postage included. 

https://www.registrarsink.co.uk/

 

Not my favourite, but those who like it, like it a lot.

 

 

[Bo Bo Olson]

If the price has gone up, then only 0.50 cents from a decade ago. Because I still have 12 in my mind, thought that could have been Euro's.

 

Back when Sandy1 was a live, we had a very huge thread on ESSR. One of the longest that wasn't what pen or ink are you using today. She called the ink mischievous, I called it sneaky.

My 17 pen and paper Chicken Scratch review of that ink, got left on Randsome Bucket.

 

If I was the least bit into BB inks, I'd have a bottle.

I do have 5-6 BB inks, which always surprise me, in I don't know how they snuck in.

[Chris1]

I did buy a big plastic bottle of ESSRI years ago. I found it too dry for me and by the time I thought about trying it again it had dumped a thick precipitate in the bottle and left a watery blue liquid. Not tried it again since. Sorry, don't want to re-open that old and still interesting thread on this one since we are talking about mixing Pelikan inks.

[Bo Bo Olson]

ESSR is only good for two years....no chemicals in it. And it is supposed to be dry, or it wouldn't shade.

 

As a real noobie, I tried to mix 4001 Royal Blue with 4001 Black...and the hoped for blue-black. All I got was only a real dull dark, dark dull blue. A toss on, use mix.

 

So, that was the first and last time I ever tried to mix an ink. There are a 1,000 shades and hues to be had....many not expensive.

[Penguincollector]

  My current Pelikan ink mix has been rather fun. Last July, I inked my Wing Sung 698 (which, for a pen with a Pilot style feed, really likes Edelstein inks) with Golden Lapis. When the GL ran out in the barrel,there was still a ton of shimmer and ink in the feed, so I added Sapphire. When that ran out, I added 4001 Turquoise, which made the resulting mix really similar to the base color of Golden Lapis, and the shimmer is still abundant.

[Mercian]

  On 3/28/2025 at 2:48 PM, Chris1 said:

I did buy a big plastic bottle of ESSRI years ago. I found it too dry for me and by the time I thought about trying it again it had dumped a thick precipitate in the bottle

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  On 3/28/2025 at 5:10 PM, Bo Bo Olson said:

ESSR is only good for two years....no chemicals in it.

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I had been made aware of the foibles of iron-gall ink by the review work of Sandy1 so, when I bought my 110ml of ESSRI, I decanted it out of its (gas-permeable) plastic posting bottle, and into some smaller glass bottles.

 

The small amount of faffing and the small outlay on a few gas-tight glass bottles were well worth it for me (despite my Yorkshire blood and lamentable laziness), because taking this precaution has meant that my stash of ink is still good long after its expected shelf-life