I'm thinking about doing some mixing. I have eye droppers, but I need a place to put the ink. since I'm not gong to be mixing a lot (quantity wise) i need something that I can fit my pen in. What do you suggest?

I just use old empty ink bottles. I especially love the old Sheaffer Skrip bottles with the little built-in well. If you don't have any empty ink bottles, you can sometimes find them at thrift or antique stores, I've seen them advertised on eBay, too. Or, you could just write a whole lot more to empty one of your bottles so you'd have the empty for ink mixing. Good luck. [edited because I can't spell this late at night]

I got a variety of smallish bottles at an art supply place. There's some kind of small bottle supplier on the internet somewhere too, but I've forgotten the name and URL. I also use empty ink bottles. The smallish bottles of Luxury Blue are especially handy.

Doug

I tend to experiment with very small quantities- 1-2 mL or so. I use a syringe to take the ink I need from the original bottles, and deposit the ink in one of the Dillo/KCat special polycarbonate ink vials. I usually experiment with ratios, working in tenths of a mL to titrate up to the color I was looking for.

The vials fit all the pens I have. For those tiny quantities, sticking the pen in, tilting the vial back until the ink is where I need it, and filling the pen works just dandy.

I've also mixed ink directly in the syringe or within a pen's piston filler, but that's a bit messy, goofy and downright not advisable.

Aaron

I second this; one further suggestion would be to find a stable base to hold the vial, as they are rather tippy. Just a hunk of playdough would work. If you have a drill, a small piece of wood with a hole just larger thatn the vial would work as well. It's just a littler extra insurance.

One procedural tip---start with the least dominant color, add the more dominant one SLOWLY until you reach the desired result. If you do the opposite, you may end up with way more of the mixture than you want. Mixes also sometimes tend to get darker after sitting a while (overnight), so it may take some readjustment after that time.

Mixing is an adventure, sometimes the results will surprise you. For example, starting with Navajo Turquoise, and adding Shahs Rose will yield a very dark blue long before any purple hue appears. I think the green of the turquoise and the red of the rose, being near opposites on the color wheel, cancel each other out and make the mix darker. The rose is a bluish red, so the blue component adds to the overall blueness. Keep adding the rose, and it becomes almost black, then a deep dark purple, and eventually a red violet. In between those stages, there are many useful hues. Have fun!

Dan

click here!

Ink mixing kit by PR from Pendemonium.
No affiliate etc!

Good comments from Aaron. However I don't recall seeing Dillo/KCat special polycarbonate ink vials. Sounds interesting. Can someone point me to a link? I do use the Write Fill product purchased from Pear Tree.

Love the Write Fill kit!

Saw this ink mixing kit on eBay, was sore tempted but restrained myself:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Ink-Mixing-Kit-Private...1742.m153.l1262

I think thats a great idea. I need some syringes anyway. It looks like a great kit!

I'm tempted too!

A more complete way to view what's going on is that these two colors happen to be close to ideal subtractive primaries. What this means is that they each absorb a specific wavelength of light that corresponds to an additive primary color (i.e. the red-green-blue [RGB] system developed for human perception), and a limited range of wavelengths around the primaries to a lesser degree. Basically put, Navajo Turquoise absorbs red and a lot of the orange and yellow wavelengths, leaving green and blue to dominate the reflected light, making the ink look like cyan. Similarly, Shah's Rose absorbs green, leaving behind red and blue to make magenta. The third subtractive primary would be yellow ink, which absorbs blue (red and green combined additively looks yellow to human eyes).

So what really happens when you combine Navajo Turquoise and Shah's Rose is that you're subtracting both red and green from white light, which leaves behind blue. The actual proportions to use are not so simplistic, but this is the basic concept behind mixing inks (any set of colors if you can plot their absorption spectra, although primaries are more intuitive and can create more useful hues).

JayLo- see this thread. They're 7 mL vials purchased from Test Tubes Online, but I don't have my bookmarks with me and can't point you to the product. Shipping is spendy from TTO, so folks usually buy from Dillo. The system was devised by KCat.

edit: Found it! These are the ink vials Dillo sells.

Aaron

I don't store my mixed ink - I use a syringe for the purpose and I just memorize the formula so that all I need to do is to suck up the exact portions again and suck in air to mix. Quick and simple. Of course something like the Visconti travelling inkwell would help if I'd really wanna keep some and usually I'd only want to do so when I'm actually travelling.

I used to work in a university medical science lab. But maybe you can get somebody to pince same for you. As small vials theyr'e called Eppendorf reaction vessels. 1.5 and 2.0 ml. If possible get a pipette as well. E.g. from Gilson, 1000 µl.