I guess this is where this review has to go, heh. There's quite a bit here. I've added scans at the bottom, and hope I don't kill the pages. PLEASE NOTE: MY SCANNER DOTH SUCKETH!! It makes horrid scans, but I work with what I have. I also ended up with ink on the glass, which makes some of the papers look more smudged than they are in person.
Arthur from Renaissance Art (no affiliation, satisfied customer only) sent me some paper varieties to experiment on with my fountain pens. It just arrived today. And so did my new black Lamy Studio and a new ink, as well as the G. Lalo Verge of France tablets that I ordered. Quite a busy day for the mailman.
This means I had to sit down and play with pens, paper, and ink. The papers I sampled are Arches Text Wove, Zerkall Book Smooth, and Frankfurt Creme (all from Ren Art), as well as the G. Lalo Verge of France in Champagne color.
The pens were a few hand-turned, a couple of Parkers - Inflection and Sonnet, a Hero 6006, a Chinese glass pen, an ornate no-brand, and a couple of Lamy's - the Al-Star and the Studio. Except for the Chinese pens, all had medium nibs.
Inks were FPN Galileo (this word is hard to hand write, by the way) Manuscript Brown, Noodler's Russian bulletproof Lermontov, Parker cartridge blue ink, Noodler's bulletproof Luxury Blue, FPN Dumas Tulipe Noire, Noodler's bulletproof Black, Lamy cartridge blue ink, Noodler's bulletproof Fox Red, Noodler's bulletproof Hunter Green, and Noodler's near bulletproof Red-Black.
First, on inks:
The Tulipe Noire is probably the ink with the very slowest drying time. It smudged everywhere. However, I still like the color, and tonight it came out looking deep purple-black on everything. My scans will not do the color true justice. It is not my favorite ink, though.
My favorite inks are the Galileo Manuscript Brown which I use for all my journaling, and the Luxury Blue which does all my check and contract writing. Both inks flow very well and dry quickly. The Manuscript brown loves all these paper I tested and looks very rich to me on all of them; and the Luxury Blue wasn't crying either, and had quite a color range on the different papers.
Red-Black is also a favorite of mine, though it does take a few more seconds drying time. Oddly enough, it dries really well and looks great on the card stock with a smoother surface that we use at work for some of our accounting.
By far the worst ink, in my opinion, was the Lermontov. Tonight it picked up more in the lavender range, but it has a definite pink cast to it. It also seems very thick, is really wet, feathers wildly, and I just don't like writing with this ink.
The cartridge inks shown here (Parker and Lamy) flow pretty wet and tend to feather a bit, too.
As for pens:
My hand-turned pens give me great pleasure and I use them a lot, at home, at work, and out and about. They write well and I'm pleased with them. Their medium nibs all feel near perfect to me and usually lay down even lines.
My Parker Sonnet is giving me troubles. I guess I should send it off for some nib wanding. It writes very scratchy on all surfaces and no ink has really flowed well through it. It almost behaved on the Zerkall and the G. Lalo tonight. Almost.
The Inflection is a smooth writer, but very wet and lays down a thicker line than even I care for, usually. This one needs a fine nib. Overall, though, it writes well.
The Hero and the glass Chinese pen both surprised me. They have fine nibs, but both write very well. They were a good investment for the few dollars I paid for them (14.99 and 18.99 usd, respectively), and I will use them. The Hero has a really nice solid feel for a slender pen, and a nice textured grip. The glass pen is a little bulky, and the cap cannot be posted, but it is very nice eye candy with the inside painting and it writes very nicely.
The Lamy Studio that arrived tonight is a treat. It has a nice, classy look. This is not a large or bulky pen, but a nice middle ground for size. Though a little larger in size, I think it would be a good pen for someone transitioning from rollerballs. It's hard to describe how this pen feels, but the barrel is really nice - soft, almost velvety to the touch. The chrome section is a bit of a challenge for me, as I tend to grip pens lower and this section has my fingers creeping down a little. It feels really good in my hand, though. It writes well and smoothly on all papers that I've tried so far and lays down a nice wet line, not overly thick. It's a keeper.
I like my Al-Star, too, but it is a bit scratchier in the writing. It seems to lay down a thicker, wetter line than what I'm used to with medium nibs on smooth papers (thermal and card stock and slick stationery), and it catches and scratches more on textured papers and on the recycled junk we call copier paper at work. The Lamy ink tends to feather a bit, too. Overall, though, I do like my Al-Star and Safaris, but the Studio is a treat.
Paper. Well, this was interesting, too:
The Arches Text Wove is paper that I've been using for some time in my journals. I'm used to it, I think it's fairly nice. It is a textured paper, and it absorbs FP inks well. It is off-white or eggshell white. Inks dry very quickly on this paper - except Tulipe Noire, which I think dries poorly on all paper I've tried so far. Since it is textured, the paper does sometimes feel rough (especially the backside) but it is not so rough that I don't like writing on it. All my inks look pretty good on this paper. It does lend itself to making my medium line writing look and feel finer to me. Yet, the two Chinese pens wrote with ease on this paper with their fine nibs. Not even the Lermontov ink bled through this paper. Edit for a quick note: In my opinion, the Arches is still the best textured of these papers from Ren Art for multi-purpose use - pencils, sketching, watercolor, and of course, fountain pens. Even ballpoint, if you must.
The Zerkall Book Smooth is too smooth for me. It's much heavier/thicker, almost a card stock. Everything took it's time drying, and I was still blotting it 10 minutes later. Ink smudges readily on this paper if you aren't careful. All my pens - excluding the Sonnet - wrote very smoothly on this paper. It was like gliding over slightly wet ice. Slick. It's a very nice paper, and would make exquisite stationery, as long as one keeps a blotter nearby. Here's a kicker, in my scans, it looks near pristine, even the Tulipe Noire. It did, however, leave ink on the glass of my scanner, and a lot of that ended up on my other pages. My other scans look pretty smudged, especially on the Frankfurt, but most of it comes from the Tulipe Noire and the inks that were left on the glass of the scanner from the Zerkall. It's also an off-white color, but maybe a shade lighter than the Arches. No bleed through, not even the Lermontov.
The Frankfurt Creme is fun paper and very nice paper. I like this stuff a lot. It is creme colored, similar to an ivory. It is very creamy, though, and next to Arches or another paper, it looks almost ancient. It looks like it could have been in a centuries old journal discovered in some medieval ruins. I like it. It's begging for me to write on. The surface is a little smoother than the Arches, and it has a laid finish. Most everything I tried on it was accepted nicely. Inks dry fairly quickly on this paper, second in time only to the Arches. The backside of the paper isn't quite as smooth and doesn't have the laid finish, but it's good enough to write on and be accepted as a fine stationery. Unfortunately, the scan I have of this paper does it no justice at all. It looks horribly smudged, but that is mostly from the Tulipe Noire and some leftover ink on the glass from the Zerkall. The Red-Black has a small smudge, though, but Red-Black does dry slightly slower than my other inks. I would have tried to get a better scan, but it took me two dozen tries just to get this one, as my scanner kept cutting off all the edges by about an inch on each side. No clue why. Honestly, this paper looks and feels fabulous in person. There is no bleeding through of any of the inks I used. Edit: I've added another scan of the Frankfurt, but with only FPN Galileo Manuscript Brown ink. I wrote this before I decided to do a pen/ink comparison on the papers. The writing at the top is by someone at Ren Art, and looks to be in a not-so-good rollerball. The second scan looks much lighter. I'd have to say the true color of this paper is in between that shown in the two scans. Lovely creamy paper.
The G. Lalo Verge of France I ordered because I just wanted to try out a paper in the color of Champagne.
However, it seems to be a nice paper for an everyday stationery with a little class to it. I like the color, it's different. The finish is very smooth, though not as smooth as the Zerkall, and it also has a slight laid pattern to it. All my pens seemed to do well writing on it, even the Parker Sonnet wasn't quite as scratchy. My pens glided nicely over the surface, no effort at all to write on this paper. Inks took their time drying on it, though, but I still like it well enough to keep it around for my snail mail correspondence. None of my inks showed any bleeding on the backside.
I like the look of the Frankfurt Creme.