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Wearingeul – The Sorrows of Young Werther Wearingeul is a stationery brand from South Korea, that gets its inspiration from arts & literature. In their own words: “We re-interpret novels and poetry with colors. You can find characteristic inks with stories and also notes/papers which are suitable for ink users.” This Wearingeul ink gets its inspiration from the “The Sorrows of Young Werther” novel written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Capturing the essence of Werther, torn between love and despair, the ink reflects the complexity of these emotions. You get a whirl of colours. Grey… blue… green… yellow… a wild spectrum of colours with the yellow separating and emerging, and the background calming down to a grey-green-blue. The result is a complex and awesome ink. Bewildering beauty – serene and wild at the same time. Introverted but also showing a playfulness with a whirl of hidden colours. An ink that flip-flops between emotional highs and lows – it’s name well chosen. This “Young Werther” is totally my cup of tea! The ink has a slightly dry flow in my Safari test pens, but nothing that can’t be fixed by choosing a wetter pen. With some pens on hard-surface paper the shading looks a bit aggressive. But again, try a few pens and you’ll quickly find one that works perfectly with the ink. A bit of try-and-error but totally worth it. When writing with the ink, I found that it had an “embossed” feel to it. Looking closely, you can see a bit of an outlining or haloing effect. The edge of a written stroke dries a bit darker than the center, creating a thin border around the letter. A subtle effect, but it elevates the aesthetics by an order of magnitude. Love it! To illustrate the colour span of this Wearingeul ink, I did a swab on 52 gsm Tomoe River paper, where I really saturated portions of the paper with ink. The ink shows a wide saturation range, from a smoky whisper of blue-grey to a much more saturated more green-grey with the yellow shining through. The Sorrows of Young Werther can be a bit too pale and unsaturated when using dry-writing pens that favour the left end of the contrast range. When using a wetter pen, more ink accumulates on the paper, and you reach the more saturated part of the colour range, where the ink fully embraces its enthralling beauty. On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – the ink behaved perfectly. There is no visible smearing at all. Water resistance is also fairly good. The colour fades away, but a pale green ghost image of your writing remains that is still readable without too much trouble. The chroma shows the stunning complexity of this ink – a kaleidoscope of colours that ultimately settles down to a grey interlaced with yellow, with blue-green tones just below the surface. A difficult to describe multichromatic colour that looks absolutely stunning on paper. This is an ink that stands out from the crowd. 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 an F-nib Wancher Dream Pen Source of the quote, written with an Edison Collier with 1.1 nib Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the M-nib Safari) Young Werther works best with a slightly absorbent paper – you get a bit more saturation, which compensates for the ink’s paleness and just looks better. On low-quality paper, like Moleskine, there was only a tiny bit of feathering, but quite some see-through and bleed-through. The ink looks good on both white and cream-coloured paper. Also notice that this ink looks fairly pale in the ink swabs, and much more saturated when writing. This makes it a more challenging ink to draw with, because of the fairly limited saturation span when creating ink art. I used photos for the writing samples above to get the most accurate results. In scans, the contrast gets blown up and looks totally unrealistic – see the scan below. There is absolutely no relation with the actual real-life image on paper. My scanner messed this one up big-time! Below you’ll find some zoomed-in parts of writing samples. Notice the fairly harsh shading on the Sakae Iroful paper. Writing with different nib sizes The photo below shows the effect of nib sizes on the writing (written on Rhodia N°16 80 gsm paper). The initial lines were written with Lamy Safaris. With the EF/F nib, the writing looks a bit too pale with a low paper-to-writing contrast. Using my wet-writing visiting pens, the aesthetics improve significantly, with a really beautiful and complex grey result. I appreciate the ambiguity in this grey. Look once – green-grey. Look again – blue-grey. Wonderful. Related inks To compare this Wearingeul The Sorrows of Young Werther with 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 format. This Wearingeul ink stands on its own in my ink collection. Robert Oster Muddy Swamp has similar vibes, but is much darker and lacks that yellow separating out in the more saturated parts of the ink swab. Inkxperiment – Life is a Journey As a personal challenge, I try to create interesting drawings using only the ink I’m reviewing. I really enjoy the couple of hours I spend on these monochrome little paintings – experimenting with the ink to see all the shades that can be extracted from it. When reflecting on myself, I see the same person as yesterday. But increase the timespan, and a new picture emerges. The person I am today is the result of accumulated memories and aspirations spanning many many years. Life really is a journey! I tried to capture this concept within this inkxperiment drawing. For this drawing, I started with an A4 piece of HP photo paper. I first painted the square background with water-diluted ink applied with cotton swabs. Next I drew the life-line of people-shaped figures fading away in the past. To complete the drawing, I added accents with pure ink applied with the side of a plastic card. I like the composition of this painting, but as you can see the limited contrast range of this “Young Werther” ink doesn’t give much room to play with. 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 enhancing the contrast in the original drawing, and then applied an urban art filter to add texture to the background. Next I heavily muted the colour to get a more tranquil feel. I personally prefer the computational version of this drawing over the original inkxperiment. Conclusion Wearingeul The Sorrows of Young Werther is an intriguing ink with an interesting off-grey colour that – for me – ticks all the right boxes: a grey ink, muted and with some serious complexity. An ink that works best in wet pens: this ups the saturation a bit, reaching the goldy-locks zone for this ink. I enjoyed using this ink a lot. Highly recommended! Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib Backside of writing samples on different paper types Doodle - Alien Skies While drawing the inkxperiment, I used a small scrap of photo paper to test different water/ink ratios. Instead of throwing it away, I used this test-piece as a background to pencil in a quick doodle.