Private Reserve's American Blue

 

Private Reserve's American Blue is one of my favorite Private Reserve inks, and it's becoming one of my favorite blues. It's bright, it shades, and there's even a bit of coppery-red sheen. What's not to like?

Pre-water drip test.

The paper that I'm using here is a sugarcane paper, so it's really good for fountain pens. As you can see, it does pucker up a bit where I smeared the ink swatch, though.

The shading and color are showcased above and below. This ink is an oddly saturated shader, though. Most of the inks with good shading aren't very saturated, but this is a Private Reserve ink, so it's got to be chock-full of pigment. 

The bright part of the ink is the best part, but the darker tones are what make this ink really usable. Too much of that light tone make the ink too light (as I said with Sailor Souten). The dark tones and solid performance make this ink really good.

Lots of places carry Private Reserve. Go get some in bottles or cartridges. It appears that they have different sizes of bottle. That's odd.
Anderson Pens $8.80 (50ml bottles)
Goulet Pens $11.00 (66ml bottles)
isellpens.com $7.00 (50ml bottles) This is a sale price, so I'm not sure how long it applies.

Water Drop and Review Video

Montblanc Jonathan Swift Seaweed Green

This MontBlanc ink has a plant theme, but I didn't have any seaweed handy. Isn't that shot artsy? Yeah. It's a little artsy. It's also too pink. I took that picture in a potted plant under a reddish umbrella. Anyway. I kinda like it.




Seaweed is an interesting ink, but I'm not sure that i like it. My wife, on the other hand, really likes it. She has a thing for grey inks, and this one definitely has some grey in it. Check out the chromatography below for a look at that grey. It's really kind of a grey ink with some green in it. That's an interesting idea, and it does seem to get the green of seaweed. It's just not my favorite color.

Here's the written review. The pictures are pre-water-test.

 And a bunch of close-up shots. 

This is a really good shading ink. It does shade on all sorts of paper, and not just Rhodia. 

This is a picture that I took outside, and you can see that the ink takes on a much more grey cast outside. It's definitely a grey-green, and that's a weird intersection of colors, so the audience for this ink will be limited a bit.

 There's no bleed through on this copy paper

If you want to get your hands on this weird ink, I suggest that you move quickly to find some. I'm not sure where to get it, actually. I got these LE inks from the Montblanc store that was near the DC Pen Show venue last summer, and I don't see Seaweed Green on any of the sites that I usually shop on. I'm sure it can be found, but don't dilly dally. It's around $15-20 for a 35ml bottle. 

Video Review:

I decided that it was a nice day outside, so I made this video in my back yard under a big umbrella that we just got to shade the patio. Unfortunately, it got really windy at about that time, and so there's a little bit of wind-noise on the video. Also, near the end the umbrella almost took off due to a particularly fierce gust. On the plus side, I show my backyard, a little bit of my gardens, and Scraggles the Dog makes an appearance. Also, I see that YouTube converted it from my normal hi-def video into a kinda low-def one. Weird. Maybe outside isn't a great place for videos. Oh well. 

Platinum Mix-Free Leaf Green

I've got a couple of green inks to show, and this is the first of them. Platinum is a pen and ink maker that I'm not all that familiar with. They make some beautiful high-end pens (that I haven't gotten to try out yet) as well as the super-affordable Preppy and moderately-priced Plaisir. They also make a set of inks that are a little difficult to get ahold of. I've checked several sites, and it appears that Goulet is the only site that sells them. They go for $20 per 60ml bottle. Samples are the way to go for these, I'd think. 

The cool thing about these inks is that you can mix them all together to make your own colors. That's the Mix-Free part of the ink's name. There are plenty of inks that you can mix together, but most people are a little cautious about doing that because it can lead to all sorts of odd results if you mix different brands together or different collections within the same brand. I've heard of sediments and solidifications and all sorts of things. You won't have that problem with these inks, Platinum promises. Mix away!

This particular ink isn't all that saturated (so that it can be mixed well, I guess), so you see shading even on copy papers. That's a good feature for some people. Otherwise, this is a really nice green. It behaves well, and it looks 'happy,' if you ask me. 

I've got Mont Blanc's Swift Seaweed coming up soon, and this Leaf Green is much more green.

Nope, so real bleed in this nib. A couple of spots are showing through the copy paper, but I would totally use the other side of the page.

 Sorry about the yellow cast on this. I took several of these pictures under a lame lamp, but I'm not looking for color-correctness in these anyway. 

Water Test and Video Review:

Diamine Coral (now with 100% more chromatography!)

Diamine Coral is an ink that I've been using for a bit in my Monteverde Artista Crystal. It's an orange pen, and it's fun to use this color in that pen. It doesn't hurt that this is a really interesting color that behaves really well on the page.

I didn't see any of the sheen until I was looking at the swatch through the camera lense. I bet you'd see it with a really wet nib, but I didn't see it with the medium nib I was using.

It turns out that I was unsure how to spell "surprise." I was spelling it correctly, but it looked wrong so I crossed it out, tried it again, and then decided that I'd gotten it right. I couldn't re-do the review because I was darn-near out of the ink as it was. This is a great one. 

Looks like I captured some of the sheen in this picture. 

**Newly Added**  Since this seems to be a popular feature, I'll try to keep it up. Here's a chromatograph of Diamine Coral. Lots of pinks and yellows in there with just a touch of red.

Check out this awesome orange/pink ink in 60 ml bottles at:
Anderson Pens $10 ( 3ml samples for $1.25)
Jet Pens $12.50

Water Drop Test and Video Review:

Sailor Miruai (Seaweed)

This is the last of the new Sailor inks that I have to show you. All eight of them are now on the blog (and on YouTube). Go check out those reviews for more of this awesome set.

I really like that Sailor has given us something more than the usual blue-black ink (which you can still find in Sailor's Jentle Blue-Black). I'm partial to these sorts of colors, and Sailor has given me a purple black, a brown-black, and now a green-black. The color is definitely a green (as you can see below), but  the dark top-notes are much more prevalent. Certainly a color that office-folk can use without letting everyone know that they love green ink.

 I really like the smooth, wet, texture of this ink, and it went really well with my Faber-Castell Basic. You can see a bit of shading in the close-up below. This is one of the more saturated inks in the collection, so you're not going to see as much shading as you do in many of the others. It's also not got that sheen that some of the others have, but that's fine with me. Not every ink has to have sheen.

A little bit of coppery sheen in the top right corner of this swatch. 

I don't know why this picture insists on being sideways. 

Several inks compared to Miruai. I'm a little surprised by how close it is to Epinard, though Epinard is more green and less black than Miruai. I'm also surprised that I had 4 green inks at hand.

 On the "ordinary paper test" this ink does really well. It's a wet ink in a wet nib, and there's just some ghosting and a few little spots that bled through. Much better than I expected, really.

Thanks again to Anderson Pens for sending me these inks to review. It's been a pleasure, and I fully endorse almost every ink in this collection. 

Water Drop Test and Review Video:

Sailor Nioi-Sumire

This is the second to last of the new Sailor inks. Thanks to Anderson Pens for sending over these samples.

Nioi-Sumire is the best shader in the group, and that's something in a set like this. This ink shades even on regular copy paper, which isn't all that common.

 Both of these are the same ink in the same pen. Weird, right?

Here's the written review. I really liked this ink, though I don't think it's nearly as violet as it is a blue. For me, not a purple-lover, that's great.

I forgot to draw a "sweet violet!" 

Here's Nioi-Sumire on a couple of different media as well as a chromatography strip. 

 Above you'll see a close-up of the ink on a Mnemosyne Word Card, which shows the bit of sheen that you get from this ink. 

Below is a close up of the smear on Rhodia. 

The chromatography of this ink is a little one two-note. It's not the awesome mix-up of different colors that you see in some of the other Sailors in this line, but it comes out great on paper.

Here is the ink on some regular copy paper. There's nothing bleeding through on this one. Hooray! Also, I took these pictures under a different light, and it's amazing what a difference that makes.

This is a really nice ink. Those of you who love a shading ink, this is one for you. It flows really well, and it's well-behaved. Get a bottle or a sample at Anderson Pens for $18 or $2.50, respectively.


Water Drop Test: