Incoming Ink!

Well, after a dry spell ink-wise, I have two nice Sailor Spring Limited Edition inks on their way to me:

• Waka-Uguisu (Mid Yellow-Green)
  
• Sakura Mori (Cherry Blossom Pink)

Pink ink is something really unusual for me to buy, the only other pink ink I have is Levenger's Pinkly. Sakura Mori is far more subtle and sweet. I still have no idea about what pen I would put it in...

The Waku-Uguisu is much more my style - rich yellow-green! I am mad about any warm greens. Inkophile pointed out to me that it might be similar to another Sailor LE ink we both have, Hougado Souseki Uranari Green. It will be interesting to see how they compare!

Some New Paper - Il Papiro

I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to Melbourne last month - what a wonderful city! My husband and I are hoping to go again later in the year.

I only got to check out one pen shop while I was in Melbourne, and that was Taft's in Westfield, Doncaster. I was very unimpressed... since I have not been to any other Taft's stores, I can only assume that the Doncaster store is carrying just the "popular" brands.

All the usual suspects were there - Montblanc, Visconti, Dupont, Caran d'Ache, Montegrappa, and Lamy. I asked at the counter whether they had any Japanese brands like Pilot or Sailor, but the woman had not even heard of those companies making fountain pens! (I was a kind of surprised, because I didn't think Japanese makers were still *that* niche, but apparently they are.) She also had no idea about the caliber of pens being produced in Japan, this was evident by her showing me a very cheap student range of pens from Korea, saying this was all they had from "Asian companies". Needless to say, I found it very easy not to buy anything. :)

I fared better when I visited the beautiful Il Papiro in Degraves Street, which I stumbled on by accident while I was looking for an art store. Il Papiro only has a handful of stores, two in Australia, two in the US, and the rest in Italy. There were a lot of gorgeous leather journals to look at, many Murano glass dip pens, beautiful writing sets and lots of pretty bookplates and labels to personalise correspondence with.

I could have easily spent a lot of money, but I was most restrained, and only left with a set of writing sheets and envelopes, and a couple of sheets of labels, all embossed with my initial:

As yet, I haven't decided what pen and ink combination to use on my first letter... I'm thinking a nice ink would be Pilot's Iroshizuku Edo-Murasaki, though. :)

A more thorough write-up about this paper will follow.

Ack, 2010!

Late as it is, here is my first blog post for 2010. A year of change, oh yes!

I'm off to Melbourne in a couple of days, where my husband and I will spend a week wandering about the city and playing tourist. My husband asked me to make a list of places I wanted to visit, but so far all it contains are pen shops and art shops.

Now, if you have emailed me, or written to me, I will reply soon! I have only recently returned from Perth, where I spent nearly two months with my family. Christmas brought me a heap of new books, mostly about watercolour painting, some gadgets, but alas, no new pens. (For some strange reason, my husband thinks that a collection of nearly two hundred pens is "enough".)

Anyway, more later... :)

Bad Laurel, No Biscuit

So, I really hate admitting things like this, but confession is good for the soul or something, right? :P

Well, on the weekend I opened up one of the cases I use to store Japanese pens in, and selected two Platinums which I was planning to ink up for the week ahead. The pens in question can be seen in the above image, (4th and 5th from left). These are pens from the early 1970s, when Platinum was designing some extremely interesting and beautiful writing instruments. They were released in the same year and share a very similar design – flattop, tapered barrel, seldom-seen ball clip, and a cap band decorated with neat little squares. The nib units are identical, and each has a large Fine 18K white gold nib. One pen has a quiet and utilitarian stainless steel body with acid-etched black squares, while the other is flashy solid sterling silver with red urushi-filled squares.

As I picked up the stainless steel pen, I suddenly remembered that this pen had not been cleaned and emptied; I had put it in the box to photograph it, and then not taken it back out. By now, I had a vague sense of impending doom. I picked up the second pen, which I had been using around the same time as the other one, and with a sigh, I realised that this one wouldn’t have been cleaned either. Crap.

I headed off to the bathroom sink, and pulled the cap off the stainless steel pen (maybe it was my imagination, but it did seem harder to remove that cap with the images of a sticky and gross grip section in my head.) But no, there was no ink-soaked section, but there was a gross ink-covered nib, and a suspiciously ink-encrusted trim ring. The feeling of doom intensified. I looked at the semi-dry ink on the trim ring a little closer, and immediately noticed two things:

1. The stuff looked like iron rust.
2. The stuff smelled like iron rust.

NOOOOOOO!

Amidst a small panic and some swearing, I broke out a baby’s toothbrush and some ammonia. Soon I was gently scrubbing the nib, and blue-grey ink was coming out, but the rusty stuff on the trim ring wasn't moving (see the trim ring here). A half hour later, blue-colored water was still coming out of the nib, and the rust (it was definitely rust) was still there. Meanwhile, the nib unit of the sterling silver pen had cleaned free of its ink (poss. Sailor Red Brown) very easily, so I dried it off and put it away. I was feeling a little bit sick over the nib unit of the stainless steel pen at this point. It was such a nice pen! I scrubbed at it some more, but blue was still leaching everywhere and I could still clearly smell rust, so I ended up soaking the unit overnight.

The next morning I flushed the last of the blue out (finally), and then dried the nib off and sat down and looked at it. The rust around the trim ring was still there, but some of it had stained the tissue I was drying the nib off with, so I kind of rubbed at it a bit more, and surprisingly, more rust appeared on the tissue. I scratched at the rust with my fingernail. It was slightly stubborn, but soon shifted to reveal shiny *stainless* steel underneath. Aha! I suddenly realised what it was – ferrogallic (iron gall) ink!

I examined the trim ring with a 20x loupe, and could see no pitting / damage. Now, I have had flash corrosion damage on a nib unit in the past, but it occurred with R&K’s Scabiosa, which is a strong ferrogallic ink (indeed, the corrosion occurred within two weeks.) The ink which my stainless steel Platinum pen had been inked with was 15+ year-old Platinum Blue-Black, and (to my shame), the pen must have been sitting in the case for well over six months.

Evidently, Platinum’s Blue-Black ink must have once been made from a weak iron gall base; much like LAMY Blue-Black is made today. I say, "been made" instead of "is made", because I have current stocks of Platinum Blue-Black and while the attractive ferrogallic characteristic of the ink colour dramatically fading when drying still does occur, I believe it does so to a lesser extent than the old ink.

While I was lucky, and I learned something new, I’m not in a hurry to have a repeat performance, I think I’ll be extra disciplined about cleaning my pens in future. ;)

PS: I know pictures of the nib would have made this post more interesting, but I had other things on my mind at the time!

Artistic Musings

I've been having a serious problem with time lately, as in, where the hell is it all going? (Do you know it's eleven weeks until Christmas?!)

Anyway, a couple of things for today's post:

• Watercolor Travel Kits (A Winsor & Netwon Rant)
• Daler Rowney Pastels

Watercolor Travel Kits
Today, a fellow artist showed me her latest little 'splurge' - a W&N Artists' Watercolour Field Box Set. Now, I love a cute paint box as much as the next person, and I have a W&N Bijou Box which I really like, but when I saw the W&N box my friend has purchased, I was quietly horrified. The set retails near $200AU, but you can get it for around $160 or so if you look around.
Now, that kind of money would make me think that you were getting something rather decent indeed - except that you don't. The whole thing was plastic. I found this very surprising because plastic automatically makes me think of Cotman. Usually, W&N Artists' means a robust metal box with lots of shiny black enamel... but I can assure you that there was no black enamel to be found, and I think I even saw a seam in the plastic! Horror!
Personally, I think that unless you find these kind of kits deeply discounted, a budget DIY kit or case like this which you can fill yourself is a better choice.

Daler Rowney Pastels
Pastel painting seems to be my new artistic thing, so I have been expanding my pastel palette. A interesting purchase so far has been a set of Daler Rowney 'Hard' Sketching Pastels, which are square pastels sticks generally used for underpainting or drawing layers. To my surprise I found the 'Hard' DR pastels to be far softer than the 'Semi-Hard' Nouvel Carré pastels I have been using for underpainting. They handle beautifully! I was so impressed that I am now waiting for my local supplier to see what other DR pastels they can order. :)

September Update

There isn't a lot to report this month: no new pens, no new inks. I have managed to spend a few hundred dollars on art supplies, though. (I know, I know...where have my priorities gone?)

Anyway, so I have been keeping myself busy with some arty stuff - like small works with soft pastels. Now, I always considered myself an aspiring painter, specifically a watercolorist, yet it seems as though at the moment I have a natural affinity to soft pastel. It all came about one evening when I found the incredibly inspiring blog of oil painter, Qiang-Huang. Strong light and dark contrasts, clean color and expressive-yet-precise brush strokes where nothing is overstated. To me, Huang's style is perfection.

So it was 9PM and I was looking at Huang's wonderful images with fingers that were itching to break out my pochade box, but it was 9PM and I had work the next day and it would take me some time to set it all up. Instead, I got out my pastel box and a pad of Canson Mi-Teintes and just began laying color down. It was surprisingly enjoyable. The next night I started and finished another pastel rendition of a Huang oil painting. I have completed half a dozen or so small pastel paintings now, and have found I am understanding quite a bit more about color and value.

You can see some of my efforts in my Flickr Gallery:

The Prettiest Celluloid!

Behold! OMAS Scarlatto / Scarlet Red Celluloid!

Just look at how LUSCIOUS it is:

Red red red!

Interestingly, the left Princess pen from 1993 has 'OMAS Extra' on the body (as do all my others), while the new Princess on the right from 2002 has 'OMAS Italy' on the cap.

Pilot Iroshizuku Autumn Inks

The latest three Iroshizuku inks, Fuyu-Gaki, Tsukushi, and Yama-Guri, plus a couple of comparisons to show which way the ink colour shifts.

Click to enlarge!

Enjoy!

Forgotten Art Supplies : Nostalgia (or not!)

Thanks to some informative tweets from Graham McArthur about content on Drawger.com, I recently found the "The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies".

It made me smile to see rapidographs, elipsographs, Letraset, film erasers, stencils and scribes... I trained as a Cartographer, and was amongst the last to be taught traditional drafting in addition to CAD. Also, my mother used to work as a Geological Draughtsperson, so between us, we own about three-quarters of the supplies shown in the above-mentioned Museum.

The thing is though, I still *use* about half of those supplies today. I have a deep love and appreciation for them! After all, I was a child who was given sheets of Letratone and a burnisher/stylus to play with, not scrap paper and crayons. I didn't use pencils to colour illustrations or diagrams for my school assignments; I used self-adhesive Pantone Letrafilm in a rainbow of PMS colours.

Last year I wanted a new set of French Curves and some small triangles. I looked high and low for a set of decent quality cut and weighted plastic curves, but all I readily found were cheap and poorly finished sets with seams - they were almost disposable! (For someone who always buys the best hand-tools she can afford, and who considers an all-brass rolling parallel ruler as one of her most treasured possessions, this experience was a tiny bit heartbreaking.)

Quality over quantity... those were the days. ;)

July Update

It's been a quiet few months in pendom for me of late. Work, art and friends have been taking up more and more of my time. But, there are some small tidbits of (old) news to share...

• Pilot Iroshizuku Autumn Inks
  Three gorgeous new inks came out several weeks ago, and I must say that the Autumn edition is my favourite Iroshizuku release so far. With the gorgeous red-orange fuyu-gaki, burgundy-brown tsukushi, and subdued brown tones of yama-guri (which is a match for Penman Mocha, by the way), Pilot couldn't really miss this time around.
  However, I expect others will be less pleased with the Autumn range than I am, because in pendom, blue ink *still* reigns supreme, and I am in a distinct minority because I don't care for blue ink - at all. ;)


• OMAS Princess Scarlet Red
  A second Scarlet Red Princess will join my collection this month, taking my Princess total to six. Scarlet Red is my favourite OMAS celluloid after the beautiful Saft Green.


• Nakaya Piccolo IV
  By now, I should have already ordered my fourth Nakaya Piccolo, but I just can't decide on a design. I have several designs of my own creation short-listed, but love them all equally, so I keep dithering between them and never choosing.
  In the meantime, I have decided to order a Aka-tame Desk Pen. No design motifs, just that classic lacquer with a rose gold SEF nib.