L'artisan Pastellier Callifolio - Grenat

April 11, 2017

L'Artisan Pastellier Callifolio - Grenat

L’Artisan Pastellier is a small company in southern France that specialises in natural pigments, and offers customers authentic and reliable products in beautiful colours based on mineral or vegetable pigments. In a collaboration with Loic Rainouard from Styloplume.net, the chemist Didier Boinnard from L’Artisan Pastellier created the line of Callifolio fountain pen inks. These pastel-coloured inks are traditionally crafted, and can be freely mixed and matched. Overall these inks are only moderately saturated, and have low water-resistance. The inks were specifically designed to work well with all types of paper, and all types of fountain pens.

Being pastel-tinted, these inks have a watercolour-like appearance, and are not only fine inks for journaling, but are also really excellent inks for doodling & drawing. I only recently discovered them, and they are already the inks I gravitate towards for personal journaling.

In this review I take a closer look at Grenat, one of several purple inks of the Callifolio series. You might think that this colour gets its name from the gemstone. But this is no Edelstein, and the other purple Callifolio inks are named after elegant wines, so my guess is that this colour is also named after the produce of grapes.

Grenat is a nicely saturated dark purple, that is at home both with fine and broad nibs. It writes well, and is nicely saturated for a Callifolio ink. Grenat also shows some fancy shading, but you need broader nibs to get the full effect. With fine nibs the shading is almost absent – you need to look closely to notice it’s still there. I personally like dark purple inks, and Grenat is one that doesn’t disappoint. This is an ink that stands out, and that is “conventional” enough to be used at work without getting strange looks. It also helps that the ink can handle cheaper paper well –no high quality journals to be found at the IT department where I work, only printing paper ;-) Like all Callifolio inks, this one is also great for doodling & drawing.

On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – Grenat behaved really well. There is some smudging, but nothing that impacts readability. Water resistance is very low though. Only a faint purple-grey residue remains, as is also shown in the chromatography. What is left on the paper is still decipherable, but will require some detective work. This is not an ink to use when water resistance is high on your list.

I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. For the Callifolio reviews, I’m using a new format to show you the ink’s appearance and behaviour on the different paper types. On every small band of paper I show you:

An ink swab, made with a cotton Q-tip
1-2-3 pass swab, to show increasing saturation
An ink scribble made with an M-nib fountain pen
The name of the paper used, written with a B-nib
A small text sample, written with an M-nib
Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib)

Callifolio Grenat behaved perfectly on all the paper types, with no apparent feathering even on the lower quality papers in my test set. Drying times with an M-nib are mostly in the 10-15 second range, even less on the very absorbent paper. I like the ink best on white paper, and it looks absolutely fantastic on Fantasticpaper (pun intended). If you haven’t tried this paper yet, you owe it yourself to hunt around for this notebook. That fantastic paper really brings out the best from a fountain pen ink !

I also show the back-side of the different paper types, in the same order. The ink behaved perfectly with almost all paper types. Only with the Moleskine paper, there was significant show-trough and some minor bleed-through. All in all a really well-behaving ink.

Conclusion

Grenat from L’Artisan Pastellier is a fine dark purple ink, that is suited for all occasions, and works with any paper you care to use it on. The ink writes nicely saturated even in finer nibs, and shows some pleasant shading in broader nibs. A great ink for note-taking at work – dark purples are conventional enough to be used in such a setting. I really enjoyed using this ink, and can heartily recommend it.