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With too much "spare" time on my hands, I'm gearing up to catalogue (at least, say, two-thirds of) the 300 commercial inks I have. The format on which I've more or less decided is to use pages of polypropylene pockets for 2ʺ×2ʺ slides, with 20 pockets in five rows on a page, using a row of four pockets for each ink. That will allow me to store up to eight 'slides' per ink, and I'll probably keep a small writing sample on the five most common or numerous types of journal paper we have, perhaps a sixth 'slide' on my personal idea of an international standard of fountain pen friendly paper — Rhodia Dotpad 80gsm bright white paper — to capture summary information, leaving the two sides of the remaining pocket for 'swatch cards'. Taking my inspiration from Mountain of Ink, I ordered a rubber stamp and a stamping pad for waterproof pigment ink, to print ink bottles on 210–220gsm mixed media paper cut to the right size, and make it easier to (develop and) adhere to a format for information-dense swatch cards. The tentative format is shown in the image below. The swab will tell me about the ink's potential for shading, the saturated splat will tell me about its potential for sheen, the part of the image representing the ink will be close to the ink's colour as it is in the bottle, and the sections of the vane on the feather quill to show cross-hatching before and after washing with a water brush pen, in part to tell me about water resistance. That leaves one side of the last pocket available for displaying the chromatography of the ink. But what is the 'right' or best approach to putting down just the right amount of ink on the piece of lab filter paper? I want that 'slide' to aid in identification of inks, comparing inks for similarity in constituent colours, as well as tell me about water resistance; all that in a squarish area instead of a long rectangular strip that is traditionally used for chromatography. As shown below, I've tried writing on the paper with a pen (fitted with an EF nib, in this case), using an O-ring to pick up and dump ink onto the paper (which produces quite inconsistent results), and placing a tiny droplet of ink on the paper using a blunt tip syringe needle of very fine gauge. Chromatography of the drawn lines seem to show the most consistent results, but can look anaemic, and when compared to the chromatography of the droplets it seems there is something not achieved simply because there was insufficient ink to spread fully. The chromatography of the droplets come out richest in colour, but due to the small area, I'm unsure whether if given sufficient area to run the larger volume of ink in a droplet will eventually give similar colour breakdowns to the drawn lines. The chromatography of the thick rings seem to be a good middle ground between the two, but I find it difficult to get a relatively even line width around the circle. What would you do?