Pen/Ink/Paper Trios

[Penguincollector]

2 hours ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

It's a carnival in ink!

  This is such a good description! 

[Penguincollector]

  I’ve been writing these almost daily, but with very little time to photograph them and post. I haven’t written one yet today, but here’s Saturday-Monday. Saturday I used a Platinum pocket SF nibbed pen with Platinum Green, and Sunday a Brause Blue Pumpkin and glass pen with Monteverde Malibu Blue, both on Clairefontaine 50gsm SmartPrint. Monday’s pen is my new TWSBI Indigo and Bronze Eco 1.1 stub with De Atramentis Columbia Blue-Copper. 

[Sailor Kenshin]

That pocket pen is super-pretty!

[Penguincollector]

46 minutes ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

That pocket pen is super-pretty!

  Thanks, it’s a wonderful pen with a soft fine nib.

[Penguincollector]

  Yesterday and today I wrote on the Southworth ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ cockle finish onionskin paper again. I used a Lamy AL-Star B z50 nib inked with Robert Oster Liquid Gold, which I neglected to note in the writing sample. Today it was the Sheaffer No Nonsense IF with Sheaffer Emerald.

[Sailor Kenshin]

More pretty.  That onionskin paper is cool, and I always thought Sheaffer 'green' wasn't.

[Penguincollector]

16 minutes ago, Sailor Kenshin said:

More pretty.  That onionskin paper is cool, and I always thought Sheaffer 'green' wasn't.

  Thanks. Sheaffer Emerald is teal, or peacock green, really. The onionskin paper was a lucky thrift score.  I love finding vintage paper. 

[Penguincollector]

   I wanted to try something different, so I tried 4 pens on a semi cheap legal pad because it was sturdy enough to hold on my lap as I watched soccer. I also wanted to write on the tempting blank back of a business card.

[Penguincollector]

 I’ve  a few different things that I have been writing that I have to sort through and see if I have posted them, but here’s yesterday’s writing with my new Parker IM. It’s the first new Parker I have bought in a very long while, and it’s impressive.

[USG]

3 hours ago, Penguincollector said:

 I’ve  a few different things that I have been writing that I have to sort through and see if I have posted them, but here’s yesterday’s writing with my new Parker IM. It’s the first new Parker I have bought in a very long while, and it’s impressive.

Hey Cascadia

Is that ink color accurate?  My Parker Penman Sapphire never looked that good. It was much darker and not as vibrant.

Today:  A Dozen Dark Inks On White Paper 

CLICK 3 TIMES FOR MUCH LARGER

 

[Penguincollector]

6 hours ago, USG said:

Hey Cascadia

Is that ink color accurate?  My Parker Penman Sapphire never looked that good. It was much darker and not as vibrant.

   It is accurate. This ink has shown itself to be a bit of a chameleon. This cartridge is on its 3rd(?) pen and has looked different in each one. I will try and get the writing samples together and take a picture of all of them. When I first broke the seal  (I did add distilled water as it was about 1/4 dried out but I mixed it in a beaker before putting it back into the cartridge) it was almost turquoise and it got darker and now it’s lighter again.  If you’re comparing it to when the ink was new it could have been different, I barely remember it back then as it clogged my pen. 

[USG]

1 hour ago, Penguincollector said:

   It is accurate. This ink has shown itself to be a bit of a chameleon. This cartridge is on its 3rd(?) pen and has looked different in each one. I will try and get the writing samples together and take a picture of all of them. When I first broke the seal  (I did add distilled water as it was about 1/4 dried out but I mixed it in a beaker before putting it back into the cartridge) it was almost turquoise and it got darker and now it’s lighter again.  If you’re comparing it to when the ink was new it could have been different, I barely remember it back then as it clogged my pen. 

 

When Penman came out I bought all the colors except black.  Mocha was the only one I ended up liking.  I put Sapphire in my pearl and black Duofold. I tried to like it but the bottle and cartridges I had didn't have the pizzazz everyone was talking about, at least on the Staples paper I was using at the time (maybe Ampad).  I had Clairefontaine too but I mostly used the large pads on a clipboard or in a leather folio.  Turquoise is what I remember when I cleaned the pen out. 

 

I didn't care for the green and never filled a pen with it.  The burgundy wasn't to my taste either.

 

Either last year or the year before I found the unused green in the back of one of my ink drawers.

CLICK FOR LARGER

 

 

[jchch1950]

What happened with the water of the ink? Are mushrooms growing? Does it happen to your other Penman Inks?

[Bo Bo Olson]

A decade and more ago, a fine poster gave me a pack of Penman Sapphire, and it was always only a nice blue...not up to Visconti blue for vibrance, sheen was never found; no matter how and into what light I tilted the page.

I do have good to better papers.

[USG]

5 hours ago, jchch1950 said:

What happened with the water of the ink? Are mushrooms growing? Does it happen to your other Penman Inks?

 

I don't know what that stain is or if it's on the inside or outside.  Looks like a dried ink drip  from when I dip tested it a long time ago.  None of the other penman inks completely evaporated like that.  I don't know why this one did, the cap was on very solid when I discovered it in the back of a drawer.

 

3 hours ago, Bo Bo Olson said:

A decade and more ago, a fine poster gave me a pack of Penman Sapphire, and it was always only a nice blue...not up to Visconti blue for vibrance, sheen was never found; no matter how and into what light I tilted the page.

I do have good to better papers.

 

That was pretty much my impression as well.  I always thought of the Penman Sapphire I had, as a very concentrated turquoise in with a touch of black which gave it a dull less vibrant look compared to your example of Visconti Blue.  I thought all the Penman inks had some black in them, which in the case of Mocha,  looked to me like a very nice dark brown-black.  That's the only Penman ink I had more than one bottle of.

[USG]

An early write in...  One Pen, One Paper, One Ink

Lamy 2K (OM)

PR American Blue

CLICK TO ENLARGE

[Penguincollector]

Ooh, I just bought that ink, @USG. It’s so sheeny on Snow! 

[USG]

I really like the J Herbin Emerald of Chivor ink.

Here it is on Tomoe River S paper from a Junlai 630( #8M)

Click to Enlarge

 

 

Another J Herbin ink I'm testing :  Cornaline d'Egypte

This one on Cosmo Snow paper

Pen:  Jinhao X159 (M)

CLICK TO ENLARGE

 

 

 

One More:  Sailor Manyo Nekoyanagi, X159 (M)

It seems to have a dark outline around the letters

(It was coming out dark, so I had to lighten the pic to get the color close to how it looked by eye)

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mercian]

On 3/17/2024 at 9:47 AM, Bo Bo Olson said:

A decade and more ago, a fine poster gave me a pack of Penman Sapphire, and it was always only a nice blue...not up to Visconti blue for vibrance, sheen was never found; no matter how and into what light I tilted the page.

I do have good to better papers.

 

On 3/17/2024 at 1:11 PM, USG said:

That was pretty much my impression as well.  I always thought of the Penman Sapphire I had, as a very concentrated turquoise in with a touch of black which gave it a dull less vibrant look compared to your example of Visconti Blue.

I bought some cartridges of all of the Penman inks right at the end of their production by Parker.
Penman Sapphire as-manufactured was a very intense blue - it was not a dark blue, but was instead an intense colour that ‘popped’ off the page. I had never seen anything like it. I was transfixed, and awed. I fell completely in love with it right away, even if I regretted its propensity to smear.
If I had to try to give a name to its colour, I would call it ‘Very Blue’ 😉 The ink’s ‘awesomeness’ was increased by the fact that it shaded and provided red sheen too.

I used-up all my Sapphire very quickly, and then went back to the store to buy a full bottle, only to find that the Penman inks had been discontinued 😢

 

Once I found that out, I bought the store’s last pack of cartridges of Emerald - and then hoarded them, along with my cartridges of the other colours. I used them only on ‘special occasions’, in the hope of preserving my access to these inks for as long as I could.

I still had cartridges of most of the other colours until very recently, but I am now down to maybe one or two of Emerald.

My experience with these old cartridges has, of course, been that the volume of ink has reduced in them as the gas-permeable plastic has allowed water - and other components - to evaporate out of them.

When I have had to ‘restore’ the ink in my Penman cartridges by adding water, I have found that the ink colours come out as less-vibrant than they did when new.
I assume that one of the components that has evaporated was a dye-stabiliser, or that oxygen has got-to the dyestuffs in the 20+ years that the cartridges have been waiting to be used.

 

@Bo Bo Olson I am shocked - shocked, I say! - by your impression of PPS. I had to clutch my pearls to my throat when I read it! 😉
Having had the ink when it was new, I wholeheartedly agree with Sandy1’s enthusiastic thoughts about Parker Penman Sapphire in her review of it. (I recently restored most of her photos to her text, in a post which can be found here. Please click the ‘Expand’ link to be able to see her photos restored to her review text.)

 

I am indebted to Beechwood, who pointed me towards a review that contains the best - i.e. most-representative of the ink’s capacity for sheen - photos of PPS that I have seen.
That review can be found here.

 

Nowadays there are many blue inks available that have heavy dye-loads, and several replicate the capacity of PPS to give sheen, and to shade too. But PPS was (as far as I know) the very first ink to offer this experience to users.
Those of use who were lucky enough to get it when it was new were wowed by this exciting new ink, and its disappearance from the market - long before any similar inks were available - made us lament its loss, and only increased its appeal.

 

Slàinte,
M.

[Mercian]

18 hours ago, USG said:

An early write in...  One Pen, One Paper, One Ink

Lamy 2K (OM)

PR American Blue

CLICK TO ENLARGE

This is similar to how Parker Penman Sapphire looked when it was still being manufactured (i.e. not after sitting around for twenty years after its discontinuation 😉).

 

Private Reserve American Blue was one of the inks to which people who had been ‘bereaved’ of Parker Penman Sapphire flocked when it came out.
Another was PR DC Supershow Blue, which seemed to be an even closer match to PPS.