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Pelikan Edelstein Apatite (Ink of the Year 2022) In 2011 Pelikan introduced the Edelstein series of high-end inks, available in a variety of colours. The theme of the Edelstein concept is the gemstone – each ink corresponds to the beautiful colour of a gem. The Edelstein line of inks is presented in 50 ml high-value bottles, that are truly beautiful, and worthy of a place on your desk. In this review I take a closer look at Apatite, the Edelstein Ink of the Year 2022. This is a limited edition ink, that will probably be gone in the near future. Apatite is a blue-turquoise shade of colour, that – according to Pelikan – “leads to an association with the natural element of water, an ink colour that lets all thoughts flow…” Hmm… that sounds a bit over-the-top to me. In reality, the colour was more of a bummer (personal opinion): I don’t hate it with the same intensity as I do Edelstein Jade, but a full page of Apatite is still too much for me. Nevertheless, I collect these Edelstein inks, so I had to get this one, even if it’s not my cup-of-tea. And – as always – I will do my best to give you an honest technical review. The chromatography shows the blue & green components of the ink. It’s definitely a blue with green undertones, but I wouldn’t call it a teal. From the bottom part of the chroma, you can already deduce that Apatite is not a water resistant ink. This Edelstein ink can handle all nib sizes with ease, always showing an easily readable line. I do prefer this ink with the broader nibs (M,B), where it becomes more saturated and leaves a darker line on the paper. Regardless of nib size, a full page of text written with Apatite remains overwhelming. Too bright and in-your-face for me… this ink could use some toning down. To show you the impact of saturation on the ink’s look & feel on paper, I made some scribbles where I really saturated portions of a scrap of 52 gsm Tomoe River paper with ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range. Apatite has a medium dynamic range, with not too much difference between the light and darker parts. But the ink makes the most of it: in writing Apatite mainly uses the extremes of this spectrum, resulting in fairly heavy shading. Personally, I find this one of the few strong points of this blue-turquoise ink. The ink copes well with a wide variety of paper, both white and more creamy ones. Apatite prefers higher quality paper. With the cheaper variety, you get a tiny amount of feathering, and a fair amount of see-through and even some bleed-through. I had expected the ink too look ugly on yellow-leaning paper, but that’s not the case. The ink’s colour remains fairly consistent across paper types. Below, you’ll find the writing samples. On each scrap 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 Safari fountain pen The name of the paper used, written with a B-nibbed Lamy Safari A small text sample, written with the M-nib Safari Source of the quote, written with a wet-writing Laban Rosa Lilac M-nib Drying times of the ink on the paper, with the M-nib Lamy Safari I’ve also added a few photos to give you another view on the ink. Scanned images and photos often capture different aspects of the ink’s colour & contrast. That’s why I present them both. In this case, the photos capture Apatite’s colour best – the scans of the writing samples are little bit too bright, and definitely exaggerate the shading. Writing with different nib sizes The picture below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. As you can see, Apatite works well in all nib sizes, even the finest ones. I personally prefer using it with broader nibs, where the colour becomes more saturated, and more to my liking. With broader nibs, the shading becomes more pronounced, and can be quite good-looking. In my opinion, this prominent shading is the saving point for the ink. Related inks To show off related inks, I use my nine-grid format, with the currently reviewed ink at the center. This format shows the name of related inks, a saturation sample, a 1-2-3 swab and a water resistance test – all in a very compact form. This allows you to easily compare the ink with its eight direct neighbours, which I hope will be useful to you. Apatite sits somewhere between Kaweco Paradise Blue (greener) and Robert Oster Clearwater Rain (more blue). Personally, I prefer the Robert Oster ink over Apatite: only minute differences in the amount of green, but Clearwater Rain simply look better to me. Inkxperiment – Green City As a personal experiment, I try to produce interesting drawings using only the ink I’m reviewing. For me this is an incredibly fun extension of the hobby, and one that continuously challenges my drawing skills. Inspiration for this drawing comes from a town project in my home town. To mitigate the effect of “heat islands” in the town center, one of the central market squares will be turned into a city forest (from the current situation where it is a huge slab of concrete – a superb heat absorber that drives up air temperature with a few degrees). A fine geo-engineering project, that I fully support. I started with an A4 piece of 300 gsm watercolour paper, on which I first drew an outline of a town street leading up to the market square. I then used water-diluted ink with ever more saturation to fill in the street and buildings, using Q-tips as a drawing tool. Next I used more or less pure Apatite to draw the tree trunk. Foliage was added with the rough end of a dishwashing sponge dipped in ink. Final touches of the drawing were done with the M-nib Lamy Safari. This Apatite ink turned out to be rather difficult to draw with. Not much dynamic range, which made it fairly difficult to add texture to the drawing. Definitely not my favourite drawing ink! Inkxpired – computational art I love experimenting with pen/ink/paper, and have added another layer as part of the hobby. I’m exploring computational art, inspired by the ink drawings I do during ink reviews. Another fun offshoot of the hobby… and all that starting with a few drops of dye-coloured water on paper. For this computational derivation, I abstracted the scene a bit, and used a colour palette that adds some contrast to the drawing. The result is definitely an improvement over the original, somewhat bland, Apatite drawing. Conclusion This Edelstein ink of the year 2022 with its blue-turquoise colour is not a must-have in my book. The colour fails to convince me, and the ink has some issues with lower quality paper. Shading looks great though, and is the one saving feature of this ink – in my opinion. A decent ink, just not for me. To salvage my bottle, I already explored some ink mixes with last year’s Golden Beryl, that result in several beautiful greens. Never let a bottle of ink go to waste! Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Back-side of writing samples on different paper types