L'artisan Pastellier Callifolio - Anahuac

[namrehsnoom]

L'Artisan Pastellier Callifolio - Anahuac

 

L’Artisan Pastellier is a small company in southern France that specialises in natural pigments, and offers customers authentic and reliable products in beautiful colours based on mineral or vegetable pigments. In a collaboration with Loic Rainouard from Styloplume.net, the chemist Didier Boinnard from L’Artisan Pastellier created the line of Callifolio fountain pen inks. These pastel-colored inks are traditionally crafted, and can be freely mixed and matched. Overall these inks are only moderately saturated, and have low water-resistance. The inks were specifically designed to work well with all types of paper, and all types of fountain pens.

 

Being pastel-tinted, these inks have a watercolor-like appearance, and are not only fine inks for journaling, but are also really excellent inks for doodling & drawing. I only recently discovered them, and they are already the inks I gravitate towards for personal journaling.

 

 

This review focuses on Anahuac, one of several ochre-coloured inks of the series. Anahuac is said to signify “country by the waters” in Nahuatl, the old Aztec language. It is thought to refer to the great plateau valley in which the city of Mexico is located. Think of a heat-shimmering valley floor, with orange-brown sun-baked dusty basin.

 

Anahuac has a really nice orange-ochre-brown hue, that works well with with all types of pen and paper. But the ink shows its soul mainly in the wetter pens, where it exhibits a darker tone and really fine shading. With wet pens, the ink writes with excellent flow and lubrication – a real pleasure to use. And contrast with the paper is also excellent – not always the case with ochre coloured inks that are often a tad too light for comfortable reading. The writing sample below used Lamy Safari (M and B-nib) as an example of a drier pen. The other text was written with my wet pens – a Parket Sonnet with F-nib and a Pelikan M400 with M-nib.

 

 

Like all Callifolio inks, Anahuac is also great for doodling and drawing – with a colour-spectrum ranging from dark to light-orange ochre. Beautiful ! Technically, the ink behaved very well, with good performance in all nib sizes. It’s perfectly usable in an EF nib – although a bit on the light side - and starts to show some very aesthetic shading in M-nibs and above. I found the ink pleasurable to write with. Like stated above, if you give the ink a wet pen, it will reward you with great colour and performance.

 

 

On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – Anahuac behaved perfectly, with almost no smearing of the text. Water resistance is a mixed story though. With the droplet test (a 15 minute soak with water droplets on the paper), a readable light-ochre residue remains which is still legible. Short exposures to running tap water are also OK, but with longer exposures the text rapidly becomes totally unreadable.

 

 

I’ve tested the ink on a wide variety of paper – from crappy Moleskine to high-end Tomoe River. For the Callifolio reviews, I’m using a new format to show you the ink’s appearance and behaviour on the different paper types. For this review I’ve added Leuchtturm 1917 to the paper mix. I also used the wetter pens for the writing samples, instead of my usual Lamy Safari. On every small band 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 my wet Parker Sonnet fountain pen (F-nib)
• The name of the paper used, written with a wet Pelikan M400 (M-nib)
• A small text sample, written with the Parker Sonnet F-nib
• Drying times of the ink on the paper (with the F-nib Parker pen)

Anahuac behaved perfectly on all the paper types, with no apparent feathering even on the lower quality papers in my test set. Drying times are on the long side in the 15-20 second range, except on some of the more absorbent papers. The ink looks fabulous on Paperblanks, which I use for daily journaling. In fact, it works really well with all of the paper types in my test set.

 

I also show the back-side of the different paper types, in the same order. The ink behaved very good with almost all paper types. Only with Moleskine and Graf von Faber Castell, there was significant show-trough and bleed-through. The swab with the 70gsm generic paper also resulted in some bleed-through. All in all a really well-behaving ink.

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

Callifolio Anahuac from L’Artisan Pastellier is a splendid orange-ochre ink that is equally at home with both writing and drawing. The ink has good contrast with the paper, and works well with all paper types. But do yourself a favour and use this ink with a wet pen – the ink will reward you with its soul, and your writing experience will be that much better.

 

 

Technical test results on Rhodia N° 16 notepad paper, written with Lamy Safari, M-nib

 

 

Edited March 4, 2017 by namrehsnoom

[MsRedpen]

Great review!

Indeed good to consider for journaling.

[visvamitra]

Excellent review and I see you read Patrick Rothfuss. Auri is one of my favourote characters in his books. The Slow Regard od Silent Things is beautiful novel. Thank you for the review and as always I'm awaiting next one

Edited March 4, 2017 by visvamitra

[Chrissy]

Thank you for this excellent review. I've tried to buy some of these inks but failed to get any response via their web-site.

[namrehsnoom]

Auri is one of my favourote characters in his books. The Slow Regard od Silent Things is beautiful novel.

+1 ... patiently waiting for the rest of the story to unfold in the next novel Doors of Stone

 

Thank you for this excellent review. I've tried to buy some of these inks but failed to get any response via their web-site.

From what I hear from other members, they are known for not answering e-mail. But Lgsoltek reported that placing orders on the website went well, and without problems (see his comments in the thread of https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/315540-lartisan-pastellier-callifolio-heure-doree/ )

[visvamitra]

Well, I appreciate the guy a lot but his obsessive revision process will probably make us wait few more years till Doors of Stone hits the shelfs. I don't mind. I prefer to get excellent book than mediocre rushed one but I would lay by saying I'm not curious how the story will end. Happily there's so much great books that my problem is not lack of great stories to read but lack of time to do so.

[77kath]

I just got several of these from Vanness.