Platinum mixable inks

[Preserved_Killick]

Anyone have experience mixing Platinum's mixable inks?

 

I love black inks, especially those with sheen or shading, or a hint blue or green to them.  Would love to hear any reviews of Platinum's mixable inks, especially anyone who's made a more interesting black ink from their base colors.

[arcfide]

I've played around with them, but I got them mostly for my kids to play with the inks and understand colors. They made their own colors and the like. Unfortunately for your question, they have distinct preferences for pale inks, and so they tend to use the dilution liquid, rather than building up "interesting blacks". 

 

Platinum's inks are extremely consistent, high quality, and very well-behaved. If anything, the one addition I would make to their inks might be some Vaness's White Lightning ink additive if you think the inks have a little too high of a surface tension, and thus maybe write too dry for you. Otherwise, they have excellent flow, and very good shading. They have a variety of vary distinct colors, which I think they did to provide users with options of using the colors as-is, but also only buying one or two bottles of ink to get the color that they want, since the combination of various pairs of inks creates a very wide array of colors. However, I have found that you can mix up as many colors as you want to get a very surprising range. Unfortunately, because of the unique colors, what you actually get from these more complex mixes can be really surprising and hard to predict if you are not a color theory expert. That makes it really fun to experiment though. 

 

You could definitely mix up an interesting bit of colors, and I definitely played with that. I don't know how much sheen I achieved, but I definitely got some really interesting combinations of very black blue-blacks. Their normal black and their mixable black are really good blacks in their own right, so you'd be building from a solid base. 

 

Platinum does offer the smaller bottles, which helps with the total ink costs a lot, if you aren't sure exactly what you want. 

 

Overall, I highly recommend them and they are really good inks. They don't have quite as much water resistance as I would have liked, but I think people have mixed Platinum's line of IG inks together amongst themselves without too much issue. I wouldn't mix the Mix Free Inks with the IG inks though, as I expect the Mix Free inks to be on the alkaline side of things or PH Neutral, but not acidic. 

[A Smug Dill]

11 hours ago, Preserved_Killick said:

Anyone have experience mixing Platinum's mixable inks?

11 hours ago, Preserved_Killick said:

Would love to hear any reviews of Platinum's mixable inks,

 

Fellow forum member @Inka (who hasn't signed in since 2014) reviewed five out of the nine Platinum Mixable (né Mix-Free) inks on FPN.

 

11 hours ago, Preserved_Killick said:

especially anyone who's made a more interesting black ink from their base colors.

 

Do you mean excluding Smoke Black out of the nine inks specifically?

 

[AmandaW]

You would usually mix the complementary colours to get interesting 'almost' blacks. From the colours in the Mix set I'd say the Aurora Blue and Earth Brown would be the best pair for a neutral that could be shifted warm or cool.

 

Edited to add the bit about neutral - this from experience with oil painting using Ultramarine and Burnt Umber for greys and black in exactly that way. The other classic pairing is a red and a green (eg viridian and alizarin). Yellow and purple should work theoretically, but in practice the lightness of the yellow makes it difficult to get dark. There are other pairings. Lots of fun!

[Preserved_Killick]

6 hours ago, A Smug Dill said:

 

Do you mean excluding Smoke Black out of the nine inks specifically?

 

 

No -- I would almost certainly start with Smoke Black as my base, then add one or both of the blue shades to it, to see what I get.  Then maybe experiment beyond that.

 

Thanks for those reviews from user Inka.  Interesting to read about the wetness and water-resistance of these inks.

[Preserved_Killick]

5 hours ago, AmandaW said:

You would usually mix the complementary colours to get interesting 'almost' blacks. From the colours in the Mix set I'd say the Aurora Blue and Earth Brown would be the best pair for a neutral that could be shifted warm or cool.

 

Edited to add the bit about neutral - this from experience with oil painting using Ultramarine and Burnt Umber for greys and black in exactly that way. The other classic pairing is a red and a green (eg viridian and alizarin). Yellow and purple should work theoretically, but in practice the lightness of the yellow makes it difficult to get dark. There are other pairings. Lots of fun!

 

This is helpful -- thank you!

 

This morning I found this color mixing tool online, which is pretty interesting.

[inkstainedruth]

I'll admit that I've only tried one of the Platinum Mixable colors, and that was early on.  A vendor which is no longer in business had gotten an overstock of them, and was giving away free bottles when you ordered a pen.  Because I didn't have any red inks at that point, I chose Flame Red.  

Big mistake.

It was more the color of Mecurachrome (for those old enough to remember that stuff) -- a super bright red-orange color that was pale and watery looking at the same time.  I thought it was hideous.  I gave it away to a guy in my pen club for him to use for grading exams (he's a math professor at one of the area colleges).  He then turned and gave it away to someone else (I keep meaning to ask that person if *he's* given it away to yet someone else).

I like the idea behind the line in principle, and keep wondering sometimes if I should have gotten the purple one instead....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

[amberleadavis]

I like the Platinum Mixable inks and use them. I also have the Pineider Alchemy set that I need to review.

[arcfide]

14 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

a super bright red-orange color

 

I think that's a complaint that An Ink Guy also has against Platinum's normal red ink, so it may be that this is just their "definition" of red, much to some people's chagrin.