Sailor (Tsukuyo-No-Minamo) Shimoyo

[lgsoltek]

Last year Sailor revamped their four season ink line, changed them into a smaller bottle thus raising steeply the per unit price, and added four more colours. (More details see here. On a side note, they seem to have changed the name of Fuji-musume into Fuji-sugata.)

These four new colours make up a series called “Tsukuyo-no-minamo” meaning moonlight water. Sailor claims to capture the different colours of a moonlit water surface during the four seasons. If Google Translate is to be trusted, along with my understanding of the Chinese characters used in Japanese, these four colours are (my imprecise interpretations should be taken with a grain of salt):

Spring: Yozakura (night cherry blossom), capturing the colours of cherry blossoms on defrosting snow.

Summer: Yodaki (night fire), capturing the colours of reflections of camp fire on the river.

Autumn: Yonaga (long night), birds on the river in a full moon night.

Winter: Shimoyo (frosted night), frosted river in moonlight.

Shimoyo is by no means as terrible as Yozakura, but frankly it's just a boring blue black. I feel like there's tons of such blue black colour inks out there. The flow is good, the ink writes smooth, with quite good water resistance. There's a bit golden sheen which is not rare among inks of such hues, but it's quite subtle in writing.

Splash

Sample

(on Clairefontaine 80g copy paper)

(on Tomoe River)

Sheen

(Tomoe River)

Comparison

(I tend not to like such greyish blue black inks, so I don't have many similar hues to compare. I've never had the plain Sailor Blue Black - not Sei-boku - so I'm interested how different this one is. I don't have Iroshizuku Shinkai at hand to compare, but my splash cards tell me Shinkai is slightly greener. My advice is at this price you've got tons of other better choices out there.)

[Jan2016]

Thanks again for the extensive review!

Maybe a comparable ink which popped up in my mind: Pelikan Edelstein Tanzanite

 

Because of the pretty hefty price tag it would be interesting to find "doppelgangers" :-)

[visvamitra]

Well, it seems there are cheaper alternatives. I dislike when producers do it.

[rudyhou]

i'm liking this shade of blue-black.