KittyInkpot 焦糖杏仁华夫饼 (Caramel Almond Waffles) ink

[A Smug Dill]

Even though KittyInkpot proves not to be a brand completely without local stockists overseas (Soe and Soe, for one, has some of the inks from Season I and now Season II as well, when I checked a moment ago), it's a small Chinese ink brand you have probably never heard about. The one mob (possibly with multiple storefronts) on AliExpress that bothers selling relatively little-known, but visually interesting ‘chromatography’ or ‘gradient’ multi-shading Chinese inks, has only just started listing a small number. Generally speaking, it's the sort of thing you'd have to set up an account on Taobao to buy, whether you're based in China or elsewhere; and then it wouldn't be worthwhile, for the non-trivial international shipping charges, to order just one or two colours to try. It requires some real ‘commitment’ to explore.

 

This is one of the fourteen KittyInkpot colours I ordered.

 

These are the official marketing images for it:

The annotations state the paper used there was (produced on) Tomoegawa's

“machine number 7”, the colours are pink and orange and blue-purple, and

expressed thanks to the named user who offered the writing sample.

 

As you can see, there is no English name for the ink on the bottle label,

only the name of the “season” or collection of inks to which it belongs.

 

 

That all looks lovely, but how does the ink render “in real life“?

 

On Exacompta FAF 70g/m² paper, writing with it looks fairly dull:

 

 

 

It's a bit more interesting on the 70g/m² paper in Maruman ‘Spiral Note’ books:

 

 

but still it doesn't render as shades of pink and indigo the way the ink is shown in the marketing images.

 

[AmandaW]

The dual colour are an interesting concept, but for this one it doesn't look so legible on the page aside from whether it has the colours it promises. Are any of them legible? Maybe they need to be light for two colours to be seen at all?

 

Thankyou for showing us and for translating the details too.

 

I will go check Soe & Soe - appreciating they're stocked here.

[A Smug Dill]

17 minutes ago, AmandaW said:

for this one it doesn't look so legible on the page aside from whether it has the colours it promises. Are any of them legible?

 

They tend to be very dry-flowing inks and ‘thin’ on the dye load. Coming out of my Pilot Custom Enjū (or Enjyu), which I don't like using on account of its F nib having ‘too wet’ a flow and usually resulting in broader lines of ink on the page than what I prefer, the writing is legible enough. In the Pilot Prera iro-ai I used, I could see through the clear barrel how quickly the pen was consuming the ink in the converter when I tried to write legibly with it.

 

I have no idea how the calligraphy in the official marketing images was produced, but my guess is it took very slow movements to effectively increase the ‘wetness’ of the ink marks.

 

But, to answer your question, I don't know at this point, since this is the first and only one of the KittyInkpot inks I opened up and used. I also haven't tried writing with this ink on Tomoegawa's Tomoe River, Sanzen's Tomoe River S, SakaeTP's iroful, Nakabayashi Yu-sari, CRENA Spark and Stardust papers, etc.

[yazeh]

Thanks for introducing a new brand  and detailed review  and sorry for the deception.

To my eyes this is  a very detailed review. Pity you didn't post it in the review forum. 

 

It is interesting how the scan and the photo on the first photo are so diametrically different. On Maruman they are almost the same. 

 

Have you tried it on Iroful paper? If there's a paper that shows off ink properties, it's that one. 

[InesF]

That's a quite interesting set of inks! Thank you for providing a first glimpse on one of those and for doing the test on multiple paper types! 👍

(I see two Maruman paper examples with different dates and different appearances - were these different paper types?)

 

Indeed, this one looks a bit faint but the colour shift makes it interesting, nevertheless.

Looking forward to see more of these tests.   

[A Smug Dill]

1 hour ago, InesF said:

(I see two Maruman paper examples with different dates and different appearances - were these different paper types?)

 

They were pages from the same notebook.

[A Smug Dill]

I was messing around with one of the writing sample sheets, as well as a couple of different types of paper — something from a 64-page ‘scrapbook’ I picked up for $0.60 yesterday, and Canson XL 300gsm watercolour paper — putting and leaving, but also depositing and smearing, droplets of ink onto the paper, then adding drops of water, and after a while, fully immersing the sheets into a bath.

 

The results were very curious; and at this point I'm not sure how to design something to demonstrate (or disprove) how I think the ink does what it does.

 

Firstly, the ink is surprisingly water-resistant; drowning the writing sample sheet leaves every mark remaining legible, but only in blue. On the absorbent scrapbook paper, on which every ink I tried feathered and bled, sometimes straight through and staining the page beneath the top sheet, the ink seems to break down into three main colourants — blue-purple that didn't move far, coral (between orange and pink) further out, and then a small amount of khaki at the outer reaches that dries to a bright yellow.

 

The washes performed on various artefacts suggest to me that the blue-purple and coral dyes are both capable of binding strongly to paper fibres, but the coral dye takes longer to set; and they seem to act in competition with each other for binding sites, so that if blue-purple binds to some (microscopic) area first, then the coral would stay on top and could be subsequently washed away; but if the coral finds a virgin spot on the paper, then it can bind and become resistant to subsequent rewetting or full-body immersion. The yellow dye is fugitive and will just completely wash away.

 

How would I ‘prove’ in a concise way that is what actually happens, especially when the camera seems to struggle to capture the nuances of the shades of green-blue?

[lapis]

Thanks for this excellent review. I've just moved it into the sub-forum where it belongs. Sorry I didn't notice that earlier. Alone the Soe & Soe Fine Stationery company/store/link itself is stunning as regards its number and diversity of brands.

[yazeh]

@lapis thanks for doing this. This is such interesting and complex ink/ review 🙏

@A Smug Dill you can do a chromatography.

 

Then maybe film/stop motion/ or successive photos to record the complexity of the ink in the following process: 

 

I learned it from Nick Stewart. Here are two methods. 

 

1) Several water brush strokes on good watercolour paper a few drops of ink. You can spread it along with a brush or fountain pen. 

2)Same as above, this time you can try do. squiggles / tress etc, with the fountain pen on the wet paper. 

You can let it dry on the ambient temperature or use a hairdryer, or leave it under a fan etc... 

3) Write or draw something, on dry watercolour paper. Then with a wet brush/water brush do an ink wash. 

 

If you do this on absorbent paper it is very hard to dislodge the binding dyes. It is important that the paper is wet in this case, however, as the paper is not suitable for ink, it becomes wrinkle/ twisted when dry. It's fun to do in art projects, sometimes as it gives texture for the drawing sketch, but that's not what you're looking for...

 

 

[A Smug Dill]

4 hours ago, yazeh said:

Several water brush strokes on good watercolour paper a few drops of ink.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I've already done that, but I don't think it alone tests for and demonstrates the behaviour I noticed. It definitely needs to be multi-stage thing, but I don't want to film it and show the video; and I'm not confident being able to capture and adequately show under what circumstances the coral dye can, or cannot, be lifted from the paper surface, to test the binding behaviour.