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Jacques Herbin – Rouge d’Orient La Société Herbin, Maître Cirier à Paris, was established in 1670. This makes J. Herbin probably the oldest name among European ink makers. Today, Herbin produces a range of beautiful fountain pen and calligraphy inks, writing instruments, gift sets and accessories. Herbin inks are made in France, and the finishing touches on the bottles are still done by hand in Paris. Like so many others, the company jumped on the premium product bandwagon, and started to release more high-end inks under the Jacques Herbin “Les encres essentielles” label. Nicer boxes, nicer packaging, much higher price (18,50 EUR versus the 7,50 EUR for the J. Herbin inks from the “La perle des encres” series). In this review, the spotlight is on Rouge d’Orient, a kind of maroon red – a deep and rich shade of red with brown undertones. The colour is nicely done: it’s a warm colour, cosy and comfy. Not a vibrant red. Not in your face and angry. Nope. This one is sober and elegant. An ink you can use to annotate papers/homework to give useful feedback without coming over as agressive. So the colour looks nice, but what about its implementation in this Herbin ink? Here, I’m not totally convinced. The ink is really saturated, which tends to push away any shading you would normally get. With wetter pens, your writing will over-saturate making it look bland and uninteresting. I also miss some complexity in the ink’s composition. The chroma looks a bit boring, and that is reflected in the ink itself. If you look at the ink swabs in the writing samples below, you’ll notice a certain flatness and one-dimensionality that negatively influences the character of this Rouge d’Orient. On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – there was lots of smearing. The text itself remains very readable though. Water resistance is completely non-existent: you are left with some pink-red smudges on the page. This is clearly visible in the bottom part of the chromatography: the red colour dissipates with the water, leaving only a few smudges behind. Drying times for this Jacques Herbin ink are on the long side – in the 20-30 second range on all but the most absorbent papers. The ink behaves fairly well though. I don’t see any worrisome feathering, and see-through/bleed-through only appear with the low-quality paper (which is to be expected with a highly saturated ink). The ink looks equally good on both white and cream-coloured paper. I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. 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 a Lamy Safari M-nib fountain pen The name of the paper used, written with a Lamy Safari B-nib A small text sample, written with the Lamy M-nib The source of the quote, written with a Lamy Dialog 3 with M-nib Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) The writing samples above are photos, which seem to provide the most accuracy in capturing the colour of this ink. Below you’ll find a scan of some writing samples: the colour is definitely too pink-looking here. Below you can find some enlarged details of writing samples. It’s obvious that the heavy saturation of this ink drowns out the shading, giving your writing a bland and flat look. It’s only with the Sakae Iroful paper – which makes any ink shade – that Rouge d'Orient regains some character, and starts to look really nice. Writing with different nib sizes The scan below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing. All samples were written with a Lamy Safari, which is typically a dry pen. I also added some visiting pen, all with F/M nibs. With Rouge d’Orient, the nicest results are obtained with the finer EF/F nibs, where the inks heavy saturation is kept in check and doesn’t drown out the text. In my opinion, this is an ink for fine nibs only! Related inks To allow for a good comparison with related inks, I employ my nine-grid format, with the currently reviewed ink at the center. Each grid cell shows the name of the ink, a saturation sample, a 1-2-3 swab and a water resistance test – all in a very compact format. As you can see, there is quite some competition in this colour segment. And most competitors have better aesthetics, showing that extra bit of complexity and multi-dimensionality that give good fountain pen inks their personality. Inkxperiment – science matter : Einstein As a personal challenge, I try to create interesting drawings using only the ink I’m reviewing. With these monochromatic pieces, I get to explore all the colour-range nuances that are present in the ink. This is my favourite part of the review: experimenting with the ink, and trying to be creative… pure quality time! While browsing on Wikipedia, I came across an article on cross-writing. This is a writing technique where you write on the page both horizontally and vertically. This was done in the early days of the postal system in the 19th century to save on expensive postage charges, as well as to save paper. Unexpectedly, it’s still fairly easy to read the lines. And it is extremely cool to look at! This drawing is the final one in a series inspired by this technique. Red means energy, and that led me to the works of Albert Einstein who brought us the famous equation E = mc². For the cross-writing text, I quote from his 1905 seminal paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. For this drawing I used an A4 piece of HP photo paper, which is my favourite medium for doing inkxperiments. The photo paper really brings out the best from the ink. I first created the background with a dish-washing sponge dipped in heavily water-diluted ink. I then painted in the square motif, and wrote the cross-writing text with an M-nibbed Lamy Safari. I finally added the finishing touches using pure Rouge d’Orient. The resulting piece gives you an idea of what can be achieved with this Jacques Herbin ink in a more artistic setting. 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. I started by applying a colour-filter that darkened the background, and then added an urban-art filter while zooming in on part of the drawing. Next I shifted the colours to orange-red, which just looks better and fits with the “red = energy” theme. The resulting image is an abstract piece with a nice-looking colour palette. Conclusion Jacques Herbin Rouge d’Orient has a nice maroon-red colour. The ink is very saturated though, and – in my opinion – too much so in wet pens or with broad nibs. This translates to a flat-looking ink, where shading & complexity have been drowned in too much ink. The result is a bland & boring look, that lacks personality. This could have been so much better. In my opinion, this ink is not really worth the premium price: there are lots of other inks to choose from in this colour spectrum. Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types When designers fail to understand their product I got my Jacques Herbin inks as part of a gift set, that – admittedly – looks very nice and inviting. A beautiful presentation of a selection of their inks. But the designers didn’t worry about practical stuff like stability and center of gravity. Do these bottles look stable to you? Is a lab-tube bottle design really suited for a fountain pen ink that you use at your writing desk? I don’t think so. And I know that I’m right! While preparing the material for this ink review, the bottle tipped – twice – making a mess of my desk. Next time I review one of the Jacques Herbin inks from this gift set, I’ll first transfer the ink to a more suitable bottle with a solid block of glass at the bottom 😀 Doodle While creating the inkxperiment drawing, I used a small piece of photo paper to test saturation of water/ink combinations. This creates a nice-looking texture, that is the perfect backdrop for a quick doodle.