Inky T O D - Color Swatches - Blue/black - Please Post Your Pictures And Tell Us Your Thoughts

[LizEF]

Thanks, guys! Glad to help fellow ink-searchers. (I figure if I include as many as I can, then if someone already has one of them, it'll help them guess what the others look like.)

[Tas]

Thanks, guys! Glad to help fellow ink-searchers. (I figure if I include as many as I can, then if someone already has one of them, it'll help them guess what the others look like.)

 

Marvellous. Thank you !

[amberleadavis]

http://www.sheismylawyer.com/2017_2_Ink/06-June/slides/2017-06-10_Ink_21.jpg

[truthpil]

Inspired by RoyalBlueNotebooks's recent posts, here is a little comparison of two nice iron gall blue-blacks: Hero 232 and Pelikan 4001.
​The tiny bit of green in the Pelikan surprised me! Usually it leans in the grey direction and on occasion a little purple likes to show up, but not green.

 

 

 

The rest of the comparison can be found here: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/335443-hero-232-and-pelikan-blue-black-mini-comparison/

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

Your Pelikan is so nicely saturated, mine is such a dull grey. I love the Hero blue-black, it pools so dark and it's got sheen!

[Tas]

Your Pelikan is so nicely saturated, mine is such a dull grey. I love the Hero blue-black, it pools so dark and it's got sheen!

 

Mine was too. Ditch it, buy a new bottle and then, like me, kick yourself for not having done so sooner. It's as solid a workhorse ink as any. It's giving my Akkerman # 10 a run for its money.

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

 

Mine was too. Ditch it, buy a new bottle and then, like me, kick yourself for not having done so sooner. It's as solid a workhorse ink as any. It's giving my Akkerman # 10 a run for its money.

I'm afraid that since it's a liquid and it comes from outside the EU the custom's office will keep it. : ( I've bought inks from German online stores so far.

[truthpil]

Your Pelikan is so nicely saturated, mine is such a dull grey. I love the Hero blue-black, it pools so dark and it's got sheen!

Yeah, before I got a bottle I did a lot of reading on here about some bad batches of Pelikan Blue-black. I made sure to get one of the newest bottles and was not disappointed. It's definitely worth it to get a new bottle.

[Torrilin]

 

Diamine Oxford Blue. Id tried it before in a different pen and hated it. It was a thin and scratchy washed out cyan. But I think the mint Skyline has had enough flow tweaking to make me happy with most inks. Now Oxford Blue reads as somewhere between dark blue and blue black. Doodle is in a pocket notebook, so no clue if dry time is a problem yet. Pocket notebooks are small enough that almost all inks work for me.

[amberleadavis]

OOO very illustrative.

[minddance]

The following was made with a Jinhao M nib in a dip pen holder. It's all my blue blacks and some of their blue friends. Colors are as close as I know how to get them. Every color has a scribble next to every other color (1 next to 2-15, 2 next to 1,3-15, etc.) - it's just that you may have to look around to find the pairing - but hopefully the pattern isn't too hard to figure out.

 

http://www.paradoxcommunity.com/vps/BB1.jpg

 

For search engine purposes, the inks are:

• Akkerman #09 Laan van Nieuw Oost-Indigo
• Robert Oster Blue Night
• Robert Oster Midnight Sapphire
• Caran d'Ache Magnetic Blue
• Noodler's FPN Van Gogh Starry Night Blue
• Rohrer & Klingner Blau-Schwarz
• Diamine 1864 Blue Black
• Diamine Regency Blue
• Diamine Indigo Blue
• Callifolio Bonne Esperance
• Callifolio Bleu Equinoxe #5
• Anderson Pens Oshkosh Denim
• Sailor Sei Boku
• Pilot Blue Black (from a cartridge, but still dipped - whee)
• Organics Studio Ralph Waldo Emerson Twilight Blue

And friends:

• Robert Oster School Blue
• Robert Oster Blue Sea
• Montblanc Leo Tolstoy
• De Atramentis Document Blue
• Montblanc Permanent Blue
• Pilot Iroshizuku Asa-Gao
• Visconti Blue
• Montblanc Royal Blue
• Sailor Nioi-Sumire
• Diamine Misty Blue

ETA: The * next to R&K Blau Schwarz is because it was what got me hooked on blue blacks. Akkerman #09 is my daily carry. Apologies for including unobtainium inks.

Has Diamine Indigo changed formula?

[LizEF]

Has Diamine Indigo changed formula?

 

I have no idea. Keep in mind this was dipped and despite that fact, I found that the nib was often on the dry side, so that may make the color look paler than normal. Also, camera, computer screen, nothing's ever gonna get the color accurate.

[bob_hayden]

Koh-I-Noor Document Blue-Black

 

What, you say that KIN does not make a document blue-black? They just need a little help from a friend.

 

I purchased a bottle each of KIN document blue and document black and experimented with mixing them. The title and first line of the image are with the original document blue. This new bottle seemed darker than some I bought a while ago so I got out another pen and the old ink. It does look a bit lighter to me, but is it a change in the formula, batch to batch variation, or the different pen? In any case the new ink looked a medium blue, not as pale as some old or cheap washable blues, but not nearly as saturated as many modern inks. I am seeing a hint of turquoise in the scan but that is absent in real life where I see more gray than green, rather like Jinhao blue. The black looks like a middle of the road black to me, not grey, but not super-saturated. I do not see any of the green others have found in this ink.

 

http://statland.org/PenPix/KIN_BBa.jpg

 

I began my experiments with 10 parts blue to 1 part black. That gave some shading and looked like a classic blue-black, not real saturated, but not as washed out as some of the classic inks looked. I then tried 5:1 and 3:1 mixes. I got darker ink with less shading. The 1:3 looked like a good candidate for my Yiren 312 which I have been using lately for writing checks. The XF nib does not bleed on the cheap paper in my check register, but it does not offer much in the way of shading, and the XF line requires a darkish ink to stand out. For other uses, the 5:1 mix looked good to me, so I made some more. It came out paler than the 10:1 Note that other than the Yiren all the mixes discussed so far were tested in the same pen which was emptied of the old mix and flushed out with the new. In addition, the previous ink before the second batch of 5:1 was the very dark 3:1, So, I continued and tweaked the pot to 4:1 and added that in parentheses between the old 5:1 and 3:1. It looks as expected and I have 20cc stashed away for future use.

 

I think the conclusion is that you can get a nice rich blue-black by mixing these inks and the resulting color, unlike some of my other experiments, is not real sensitive to the exact ratio. In addition to the fact that someone might like a BB in this range, there is the fact that these inks seem exceptionally bomb-proof and are also very cheap. I paid $5.40 US per 50g bottle postpaid from the Czech Republic to New Hampshire USA. Most pf the bargain inks come in 30ml bottles so this works out the about $3.30 per 30ml bottle than which I think only some of the Thornton clearance inks are cheaper in quantity. So this is also an option if you just need utility cheap blue-black ink that is bomb-proof.

 

 

I did not see any feathering or bleed-through on cheap Wal-Mart loose leaf filler paper which I fkind is resistant to those issues. The inks were slow to rinse out of the Private Reserve mixing cjup and the plastic syringes and left both lightly stained. A much more objectionable stain was left on the white plastic top of my kitchen table. Scrubbing helped but bleach did not. What finally removed the stain was rubbing it with a wet bar of Lava hand soap. That is abrasive and I would not use it on anything with a glossy surface. I will do my future experiments with this ink over many layers of newspaper! OTOH this ink washed off my hands more easily than most.

[Torrilin]

 

Paper is Fabriano Eco Qua. The Sport 1.5mm has taken a lot of fussing to get writing well. Its not right yet, but its usable. Id never tried Waterman ink before and its been a pleasant surprise so far. Lots of the same write better feel as Platinum Carbon Black or J Herbin Perle Noire. The Plumix italic is supposed to be a 1.0mm, but you can see it writes extremely narrow. Wet enough for hints of sheen tho! The Sport F is very close in width to my TWSBI xf pair after a lot of flow tweaking. And Ive basically been relying on just that one little pen while I wrestle with moving logistics. The TWSBI pair like to lose their caps. The Kaweco just works.

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

An iron gall ink and a washable ink, opposite ends.

RK Salix in Wing Sung 3008 with Lamy M nib.

 

Pelikan 4001 Royal Blue in Wing Sung 3008 with Lamy F nib (very generous feed though).

 

Paper is Clairefontaine 90g/m.

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

I really like this ink. I thought it would be darker, but it's lighter than Pelikan Blue-Black on most days.

Pen: Wing Sung 3008 with Lamy M nib.

Ink: Rohrer & Klingner Salix.

Paper: Local, g/m unknown but probably 80.

 

Here's a comparison with Pelikan 4001 Blue-Black. Now, here they are basically the same but when I fill in my ink tracker, when I track what I have currently inked, the Pelikan tends to be much darker on most days. I assume this unpredictable behavior is actually the norm for iron gall inks. I'll post scans when these two look much different.

Pelikan Blue-Black is in Lamy Al-Star with no-name F nib.

RK Salix is in Wing Sung 3008 with Lamy M nib.

Paper: Clairefontaine 90g/m.

[bob_hayden]

5280 Midnight Blue-Black

 

"5280" is the house brand of a pen store in Denver -- the "Mile High City". (I mile = 5280 feet) Their pens are pricey but their ink is fairly inexpensive. It's made at the usual place in Slovenia and comes in what appear to be the same bottles used by Thornton ink (also from Slovenia). The bottle comes in a clear plastic box much like the Sheaffer ink made in Slovenia. However, unlike the other inks, 5280 ink comes with no labels or marking of any kind and hence looks extremely generic. Thornton did not offer a blue-black ink but Sheaffer does, so I thought to compare the two. I made scans on two different papers but will not post them because the inks look identical in the scans.

 

In real life the 5280 is rather pale by modern standards. I would say it is a bit darker than Salix or the last generation of Made in USA Sheaffer Blue-Black. It's a bit lighter than Pilot/Namiki Blue-Blacks. I'd call it "blue-grey". Though the seller calls it "Midnight" I would say that right about now 8:00 PM might be more accurate. I was disappointed, but if you like Salix or the Pilot/Namiki inks you might like this as well.

 

In comparison, the Slovenian Sheaffer ink is darker and less blue.

[sdbruder]

 

Thats Birmingham’s Billy Eckstine Blues for Sale. Its really difficult to capture on camera but there is actually a small hint of blue

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

I love using Midnight. It's a nice dark blue with lots of sheen and is wonderfully wet and lubricated on any paper.

Diamine Imperial Purple was in a Jinhao 992 F.

Diamine Midnight is in an OEM piston filler with Lamy-copy F nib.

Paper is Clairefontaine 90g/m.

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

Here is the follow up to this post of mine in this thread. Then I showed you a pale combination of Pelikan BB and RK Salix, but they can be much darker than that, especially Salix. (Was RK thinking about the tree "salix" when they named this ink? Either way, I really like this name). Anyway, here's the combo. Needless to say, I much prefer this dark mood of Pelikan BB than its washed out counterpart.

 

Pelikan 4001 Blue-Black in Lamy Al-Star M.

Wing Sung 3008 with Lamy M.

Paper: Clairefontaine.