De Atramentis, the Austrian ink company, has been releasing a growing line of fountain-pen friendly, waterproof inks for a while now. Buying them in North America, however, has been nearly impossible. Goulet Pens finally got them back in stock, I ordered, and within a couple hours people were reporting that they were out of them. Hopefully distribution will get worked out over time.
These inks are a wonderful addition to my arsenal and become the ones I use most often, I think. Not only are basic blue, black and brown available but they sell an equivalent of the CMYK (cyan/magenta/yellow/black) set that is used to generate color in offset printing. And they’re mixable. Jane Blundell has done a series of blog posts on mixing them.
The black ink makes my Pilot Falcon very happy. Like Platinum Carbon Black, it causes the pens to write a bit finer than they normally would.
Same thing for the Pilot Prera.
I’ve just started doodling with them. I’ve mixed up a gray but otherwise I’ve been working with the colors straight out of the bottle. They are very similar to Platinum Carbon Black in use, though for some reason they feel smoother to me, maybe a bit wetter. So far I have them in Pilot Prera and Falcon pens and a Noodler’s Creaper. As is typical of the Creaper, there is a bit of start up problem but otherwise all these pens seem to like it. Time will tell.
I did some hatching practice with a Pilot Prera filled with De Atramentis Document Brown. The color is a rich brown, leaning towards a burnt sienna. I really like it, though I can always adjust the color by mixing. That’s the great thing about these inks.
Lucky you to hit that “place order” button in time! They were sold out by the time I saw the email!
– Tina
True, and I’m still unsure how I got so lucky. Typically I’m the Johnny come lately on such things.
I saw the email a couple of hours after it went out. It may have already been too late, but I decided to hold off anyhow since my $28 bottle of Super5 Australia came in yesterday from Goulet along with samples of Super5 Dublin and Document Turquoise. That’s enough for now and I can wait until some other Document inks are easy to obtain. Then today my JetPens order came with the 4 new Preppy 02s. While I was playing with all my Preppies the cap on my 2-month-old one cracked a bit just at the edge where there would be a metal band on an more expensive pen. Will try super glue I guess. I am wondering if I should put some supportive tape or something around the new ones. Any advice?
Those Super 5 inks are certainly pricey. I think the one downside to the Preppy is their cracking caps. I’ve had a couple of them crack. I don’t want to discourage you but I’ve tried the super glue approach, tried epoxy, and the truth of the matter is that this cheap plastic isn’t suited to a snap cap. The best thing is to treat them for what they are, a $3 pen 🙂
As for advice, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to tape them in advance of breaking but I don’t know how much it would help. I got a sense that the Preppy 02s were a bit more ‘rubbery’ than the old ones. The sound when you cap them is different too. It could be that they’ve tried to address the issue. I didn’t say anything in the review as I have so little time with the pen that I don’t really know about this and so can only speculate.
Cheers — Larry
OK, I put clear Scotch Heavy Duty packaging tape on the new Preppies. On the one that already has a crack I made sure to put a pretty good tension on the tape when wrapping it around the cap. It then made that normal snap sound when I put it back on the pen. Hubby also just noticed a crack in the cap of his Christmas Preppy so I wonder if it is almost inevitable. It will be interesting to see if the cracked ones hold and the tape prevents cracks on the brand new ones. That clear tape barely shows. I had been thinking of duct tape!
Nice! You got the turquoise, too? I was using it today and it feathered on my paper!
Yes, I was hellbent on getting the CYMK color set. I’ve noticed two things about the turquoise, as compared to the brown and black. It seems thinner. Maybe that’s my imagination but while the brown and black cause my pens to draw a bit finer, the turquoise does not so I get a thicker line from it. The second thing is that if I get that thicker line it feathers, as you found. Right now I have it in a Pilot 78G and that line is fine enough that you don’t notice any feathering.
The caveat here is that the only paper I’ve used it on is my ‘test’ pad. To make these I take a cheap wirebound sketchbook and run it through my bandsaw, creating two 5.5×8.5 sketchbooks. So the paper is not great but I see no feathering from the brown or black and have never seen it from inks like Lex Gray.
I have generated a blue:brown mix that is a nice, dark gray. Right now that’s where my experiments will lead me.
Cheers — Larry