Birmingham – Point Park Fountain Turquoise

December 8, 2017

Birmingham – Point Park Fountain Turquoise

The Birmingham Pen Co.’s line of inks (30 colors at the time of writing) feature various colors based on or inspired by notable locations or people associated with its home city of Pittsburgh, PA. I bought their sampler pack, and plan on slowly going through the whole line of inks, though I expect it will take me quite a while. For those interested, I posted some color swatches in a different topic (https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/328952-birmingham-pen-co-ink-swatches/) where you can get a quick idea of what the whole line looks like together.

Point Park Fountain Turquoise is one of the brighter colors from Birmingham, but I still wouldn’t consider it a particularly vibrant ink. It is a greenish turquoise, and is more muted than other colors in the same range. I would call it something like a less saturated Yama-Dori. In my opinion, this ink really benefits from a broad nib. I found the line from a fine nib to be pale and uninteresting, whereas the broad nib showed nice shading and much more depth of color. If I had a full bottle of this ink, you can be sure that it would only ever make its way into broad-nibbed pens. It’s also worth noticing that this ink has quite decent water resistance, but showed some slight feathering with FC paper (which is more absorbent than my other papers, but is still normally a good performer with FP ink). Overall, I like the look of this ink in a broad nib, and the less-saturated color makes it quite unique, but its appearance in a fine nib really dampens my enthusiasm. I use finer nibs relatively often, so this isn't a color for me.

Flow/Lubrication: Moderate flow, but felt somewhat dry

Shading: Low (fine nib) to Moderate-high (broad nib)

Sheen: None.

Water Resistance: Moderate-high (leaves a clear grey line)

Other Notes: I managed to spill water all over the doodle and didn’t have enough left in the sample to start over, so you don’t get to fully see the darkest and lightest tones you can get from the ink, but it’s still a decent representation of the middle portion of the color range. I guess you could call it a really large scale water resistance test

The following sample was done with a PenBBS 308 (Fine) and a Franklin-Christoph 31 (Broad) on Tomoe River (68gsm, white, loose-leaf). Doodle was done with a size 3/0 mop. Flex writing was done with a Leonardt 30 dip nib.

Bad Scanner Disclaimer: Photo turned out better than expected, and is relatively accurate for the doodle. The scan is better for the writing and the splash/smear along the bottom. Scan is relatively accurate in hue, but is oversaturated in general. Photo has the opposite issue, where everything's too pale. Imagine something in between the two. Comparison inks for both scan and photo are a little off; all of the comparison inks are much more vibrant/saturated than Fountain Turquoise, but the images equalized all of them so you can’t really see the contrast. You’ll have to take my word for it that Fountain Turquoise is substantially more washed out/greyer than the comparisons would lead you to think.

Scan: