L'artisan Pastellier Callifolio - Itzamna

[namrehsnoom]

L'Artisan Pastellier Callifolio - Itzamna

 

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-coloured 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 watercolour-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.

In this review I take a closer look at Itzamna, one of several ochre-coloured inks in the Callifolio series. In Maya mythology, Itzamna is the name of an upper god and creator deity thought to reside in the sky. An interesting name for a fountain pen ink – let’s see whether the ink is as great as its name suggests.

I started with my usual Lamy Safari pens (M and B nib), which are fairly dry writers – with these pens Itzamna was not fun at all … very dry and scratchy. Ugh! Time to switch to wetter pens, in my case a TWSBI Vac Mini (M-nib) and a Pelikan M400 with M-nib. With these wetter pens, Itzamna wrote much better, and presented itself as a beautiful writing ink.

Callifolio Itzamna is a kind of orange-brown that shades nicely, and has just enough contrast on the paper to be easily readable. But remember – you have to use wet pens to get a good experience. Not an ink for the workplace, but a splendid ink for journaling.

The ink is also a great choice for drawing, with a colour palette that ranges from orange-brown all the way to a much more saturated brown. 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 the paper with ink. This gives you a good idea of what the ink is capable of in terms of colour range.

On the smudge test – rubbing text with a moist Q-tip cotton swab – Itzamna behaved perfectly. There is hardly any smudging visible. Water resistance is also quite good – even after longer exposures to water, the text remains perfectly readable. This is clearly apparent from the bottom part of the chromatography.

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 many different paper types. 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 an M-nib fountain pen (TWSBI Vac Mini)
• The name of the paper used, written with a broader pen (Pelikan M400 M-nib)
• A small text sample, written with theTWSBI Vac Mini M-nib
• Drying times of the ink on the paper (with TWSBI Vac Mini M-nib)

Itzamna behaved perfectly on all the paper types, with no apparent feathering even on the lower quality papers in my test set. The only exception is the Moleskine paper, where the ink looks really ugly, and exhibits noticeable show-through and bleed-through. Drying times are mostly around the 5 to 10 second mark, so this is a quick-drying ink. At the end of the review, I also show the back-side of the different paper types, in the same order.

 

 

Conclusion

Callifolio Itzamna is a nice orange-brown ink, that is a great choice for personal journaling. I really like the ink’s gorgeous colour. For a Callifolio ink, water resistance is astonishingly good – a pity this is not a business-type colour you can use in the workplace. A real bummer is that this ink requires wet pens, so you have to be selective about the pens you ink up with this. This costs the ink some points in my score-book! If you can live with this, Itzamna is a real good-looking ink that is a pleasure to use.

 

 

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

 

 

 

Back-side of writing samples on different paper types

 

Edited September 23, 2017 by namrehsnoom

[Carrau]

Well done, Namrehsnoom, and beautifully laid out, sketched, and exhibited.

[visvamitra]

Excellent review. I like this ink.

[Chrissy]

Very well done indeed. Your reviews are fantastically thorough and painstaking. Thank you

[lapis]

Excellent review. I like this ink.

DITTO (capitals on purpose!). I don*t have it yet, but i'll order it soon!!

[ENewton]

I would not choose this ink for writing, but your drawings showcase it wonderfully.

[ethernautrix]

That's a very appealing color, but I agree with ENewton. I wouldn't use it for writing (much).

[ManofKent]

Thank you for another excellent review.