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Mixing Sailor Inks To Get My Own Water-Resistant "toffee Brown"


chunzhi90

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Hi,

 

Recently, I'm playing with ink mixing using Sailor's STORiA inks. I find it really interesting, and I've got several nice results, such as a very bright orange color that almost looks like Fanta (by 1:1 mixing of "fire" red and "spotlight" yellow), a green-blue color that matches my Pilot 91 well (by 2:1 mixing of "ballon" green and "magic" purple), and a grey-ish blue (by 1:1 mixing of "ballon" green and "magic" purple)...

 

IMG_2341s.jpg

 

IMG_2447.jpg

 

 

But before yesterday, I hadn't tried to add black into the play. As I know brown is generally a dark orange, I am really curious to see if I can get some nice brown out of the STORiA inks. So here is my goal: a color that is similar to montblanc's toffee brown. Toffee brown is one of my favorite ink. It is a dark brown with a reddish tone.

 

And here is what I get:

 

IMG_2439.jpg

 

Guess which brown fox is from montblanc, and which is from mixing Sailor inks?

 

IMG_2440.jpg

 

Here is the answer! I'm pretty satisfied :D

Both lines are written with Lamy 2000 in fine nib, though the one with Sailor ink suffered from a bent nib a year ago. I fixed the nib, but it now writes a wider line.

 

Here is the recipe. The basic idea is to first mix STORiA "fire" (red) and "lion" (light brown) to get a reddish orange color. Then I can add Sailor's Kiwa-Guro (black) ink to make it a dark brown. I didn't note down the accurate mixing ratio yesterday, and I haven't got time to reproduce it with accurate measuring, so the mixing ratio is just to give you a brief idea.

 

IMG_2446.jpg

 

It turns out that toffee brown is a pretty reddish brown, and a lot of red ink is needed. I started with a 2:1 ratio between "fire" (red) and "lion" (light brown). After adding the black ink, I found that I need to have more red ink to mimic the red tone of toffee brown. I eventually reached a 2.5 - 3 : 1 ratio between "fire" and "lion". Also note that "lion" is a light-brown / orange ink, so I think there is already some red in it. My guess is that I can also get "toffee brown" with "spotlight" (pure yellow) instead of "lion". In that case, I will need more "fire" ink.

 

All the three inks used here are pigment-based inks, and as far as I know, mixing STORiA ink is fine. But I haven't waited for weeks to see if anything bad could happen (e.g., sediments / gas / fire / explosion / an event horizon appears). Take your own risk, and I'm not responsible for any damage from mixing these inks.

 

And as we know, pigment-based inks are pretty water-resistant, and foxes love water [citation needed]...

 

IMG_2449.jpg

 

The last line is written with montblanc's toffee brown, and the rest are written with Sailor-version "toffee brown".

And as foxes are such a weird creature (they always love to jump over dogs!), I smeared the drop of water to the right...

 

IMG_2450.jpg

 

Oops!

Edited by chunzhi90
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Thank you for this! I love your Storia mixing stories :D I could find almost no examples of mixing those inks until your posts.

 

P.S.: I ordered sample vials of Balloon and Clown greens today; will see if I can make a nice turquoise from my Sei Boku.

Edited by Intensity

“I admit it, I'm surprised that fountain pens are a hobby. ... it's a bit like stumbling into a fork convention - when you've used a fork all your life.” 

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My sample vials of Storia "Balloon Green" and "Clown Green" have arrived. It turns out I forgot to add "Lion Light Brown" to my cart before checking out :( But anyway, I was interested in mixing green with Sei Boku "Blue Black" to see if I could get a nice turquoise-blue.

- Clown Green + Sei Boku resulted in a more murky green-blue-black, a very similar shade to my Noodler's Aircorp Blue Black or Lamy Petrol, which I did not want to reproduce

- Balloon Green + Sei Boku resulted in the more turquoise blue, which is exactly what I was looking to get. Balloon Green is already a blue-leaning green and appears to be a relatively "clean" color, in the sense that adding more of it to Sei Boku shifts the latter more and more toward turquoise and then teal, does not add any dirty/brown tint.

I've filled a Jinhao X750 pen with the resulting mixture of Balloon Green + Sei Boku and will monitor it for a while. In retrospect, I should have added a little more Balloon Green (personal preference) to my test vial. But you can see here that you can basically add as much or as little as you want, to taste.

I have some empty ink bottles and will probably dump the remaining sample of Balloon Green into one + a bunch of Sei Boku, and that will be my alternative waterproof ink to use along with plain Sei Boku.

I mistakenly wrote the word "murky" next to the turquoise mixture only to indicate that it's darker than pure turquoise inks (since Sei Boku is a blue-black after all, not medium clean Blue). But the color itself is a relatively clean dark turquoise (as much as possible coming from a blue-black, which itself is not a clean dark blue), as you can see:

Tvg3YGI.jpg

Edited by Intensity

“I admit it, I'm surprised that fountain pens are a hobby. ... it's a bit like stumbling into a fork convention - when you've used a fork all your life.” 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Wow, really nice color! I love that ballon green + Sei Boku mixing! Thank you very much.

 

I guess the reason why mixing Clown Green and Sei Boku results in a murky color is because Clown Green is a yellowish green. So it has a yellow component, which is the complementary color of blue. In my opinion, mixing complementary colors will usually give you a grayish color and lower the saturation. It sometimes have a similar effect as adding black ink into an existing color.

Edited by chunzhi90
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Sei Boku + Balloon kind of settled to a less saturated color than that. I realized after the fact that this photograph came out a bit too saturated due to a mistake on my part. So not quite as interesting. Somewhat like a slightly more saturated Waterman's Mysterious Blue. I think overall both component colors lack intensity (they might be saturated in terms of particle count, but not so much in terms of the color of the particles) to be a brighter turquoise that I hoped I could get. Still it's an interesting option.

 

EDITED to add: I just got a sample of Jentle Yama-Dori, and my Sei Boku + Balloon mix look exactly like it in terms of intensity/saturation. Only slightly more blue, as I didn't add enough Balloon. So I think it's must just be a Sailor dye ink thing to have less saturation. I got a bit used to Diamine and Robert Oster offering very vivid hues. I feel like Sei Boku alone is a touch more vibrant than the combination, however.

Edited by Intensity

“I admit it, I'm surprised that fountain pens are a hobby. ... it's a bit like stumbling into a fork convention - when you've used a fork all your life.” 

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Do the Storia's behave as fantastically as Sailor's Nano Blue (SeiBoku) and Black (KiwoGuro)?

"Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination."

Oscar Wilde

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Sei Boku + Balloon kind of settled to a less saturated color than that. I realized after the fact that this photograph came out a bit too saturated due to a mistake on my part. So not quite as interesting. Somewhat like a slightly more saturated Waterman's Mysterious Blue. I think overall both component colors lack intensity (they might be saturated in terms of particle count, but not so much in terms of the color of the particles) to be a brighter turquoise that I hoped I could get. Still it's an interesting option.

 

EDITED to add: I just got a sample of Jentle Yama-Dori, and my Sei Boku + Balloon mix look exactly like it in terms of intensity/saturation. Only slightly more blue, as I didn't add enough Balloon. So I think it's must just be a Sailor dye ink thing to have less saturation. I got a bit used to Diamine and Robert Oster offering very vivid hues. I feel like Sei Boku alone is a touch more vibrant than the combination, however.

Spotlight yellow is a very strong, almost pure yellow. For other inks in the Storia line that I've got, I agree with your feeling that they are not so much saturated.

 

 

Do the Storia's behave as fantastically as Sailor's Nano Blue (SeiBoku) and Black (KiwoGuro)?

It depends on the specific metrics that you are comparing. I have KiwoGuro, but I haven't used it alone, as I rarely use pure black inks these days. Talking about dry time and waterproofness, I think the Storia inks have a similar, superb performance as KiwoGuro (and IMO, so are most pigment based inks). Also, when I look at Sailor's online product catalog, it classifies both Nano Blue / Black, and the Storia line as "super fine particle pigment-based inks". So I guess they should have similar performance.

Edited by chunzhi90
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