I got relatively few new inks this year, but there were still lots of unopened bottles in my ink stash to play around with. After my discovery of the Wearingeul inks at the end of 2023, I continued my journey within this brand – turns out I like them a lot. In 2024, I also explored for the first time the Sailor line of inks, starting with the super-nice grey-purple chu shu. Really impressive ink, and that’s a brand I will most surely continue to examine in the coming year. I quite enjoyed my inkxplorations in 2024, and look forward to trying out more inks in the coming year.
I enjoyed writing with (almost) all inks, but some I obviously preferred more than others. This end-of-year comparison shows off my inks of 2024, and I select my personal top 3 in multiple categories. Enjoy… and maybe you’ll even find an ink you weren’t aware of, but that ticks the right boxes and yearns to be bought 😉
Category 1 : most beautiful writing ink
Inks are primarily designed for writing in fountain pens. Here I select the top 3 inks that I loved most for personal journaling. This proved to be more difficult than I thought, because I enjoyed quite a number of the inks I used. Below I present swabs & writing samples (in B-nib) of all 13 inks.
And the winners are:
I knew Sailor makes excellent inks, but I had never explored the brand before. I decided to try chu shu as my first encounter, and OMG … was I pleasantly surprised. This ink is near perfect! Beautifully complex colour, a grey-purple with muted and toned-down looks – just the way I like it. And technically also a well-executed ink that writes smoothly and with excellent contrast & shading with every pen/nib/paper combination that I used it with. This one certainly deserves first place for 2024. I continued my exploration of the Wearingeul inks, and used quite a few of them. Some of these were a challenge: only well-suited for writing with very wet pens. King Lear drifted to the top: not only has this ink a beautiful muted grey-green colour, but it’s also a technically solid ink that wrote really well. For me, this ink certainly deserves second place. Third place proved to be a difficult choice: so many inks I enjoyed, and then to be forced to make a decision. This essentially became a toss-up between Diamine Weeping Willow and TACCIA Ukiyo-e Hiroshige naka murasaki. I finally decided to go with the Diamine ink, although it’s technically the inferior one. But Weeping Willow’s colour depth won me over. It’s a difficult ink. You need to hunt for the right combination of pen&nib, but once you’ve found its goldilocks zone, it’s a true beauty.
Worst of the bunch: kyo-no-oto seiheki. A beautiful pale green-blue colour, but not an ink for use in fountain pens. This is one to use with dip pens or pen brushes … and for drawing, as will become clear later.
Category 2 : lovely dissection
Inks are built from dyes and can differ greatly in complexity. When doing a chromatography, you get two results: you get to see how easily the dyes dissolve in water, plus you get an idea of the component dyes that are used for constructing the ink. Useful information, but these chromas are also beautiful objects of art. Here I select the top 3 inks with the loveliest chroma.
And the winners are:
Teranishi Emotional Olive was an ink I didn’t like too much: it has a green-yellow colour, but just a touch to pale for my liking. But the chroma looks really nice, showing the underlying blue component dyes that move this yellow to the green end of the spectrum. Add a bit of Teranishi Antique Black (1:10 ratio) and Emotional Olive darkens up a bit, and becomes so much better. Second place is for Wearingeul Lost, which shows a whole rainbow of colours. Diamine Weeping Willow shows a complex mix of multiple dyes, that eventually translate to a beige olive-brown colour with lots of depth.
Worst of the bunch: none actually. All chromas hint clearly at the depth & complexity that’s present in the ultimate ink. But if I’m forced to choose: Wearingeul Moby Dick – I see the least complexity in this one.
Category 3 : artsy inkxperiment
With every ink review, I try to do an “inkxperiment” where I simply enjoy myself exploring the colour range nuances of the ink while making a more or less abstract drawing. Some of these worked well, others less so. But all of them were fun to do, and allowed me to stretch my drawing skills. Here I select the top 3 inks with the most successful inkxperiment (my personal opinion). Inks are obviously for writing but are also excellent material for watercolour style drawing. I’ve found that these inkxperiments show quite well what can be achieved with the inks in a more artistic setting. HP photo paper has become my medium of choice for these drawings: this is a combination that works really well and makes almost any ink look good.
And the winners are:
The lovely grey-purple of Sailor Jentle chu shu makes it a great ink to draw with. I painted an industrial-looking picture with it that captures the atmosphere of a mining town (my home town in the 1960-70’s). The drawing with kyo-no-oto seiheki is my second-place choice: seiheki is not designed as a writing ink, but it’s definitely a great choice for drawing. The inkxperiment shows that you can coax both blue and green tones from this single ink – simply amazing! Third place goes to Colorverse Under the shade. I like the simplicity of this one, and the atmosphere of serenity that it creates. An excellent drawing ink!
Worst of the bunch: Teranishi Modern Red. I messed up this drawing of a lighthouse, using too saturated a colour for the building. A good idea, but a bad execution. Well… it’s from our mistakes that we learn.
Category 4 : inkxpired computations
For some time now, I am exploring computational art based on the ink drawings I do with my ink reviews. Using digital techniques, I tweak the monochromatic ink paintings. The original painting often dictates the direction of these digital manipulations: abstracting it a bit, shifting the colour tone, emphasizing some details. In many cases, that works quite well – and the resulting pieces are often great as screen-savers on my laptop.
And the winners are:
- Teranishi Modern Red
- Sailor Jentle chu shu
- The trilogy – Under the Shade / Emerald Gardens / seiheki
Some heavy duty digital manipulation saved the lighthouse inkxperiment. I managed to lift the lighthouse from the original painting, and create a steampunk style old-looking technical drawing. I really like the result. Second place goes to the chu-shu drawing: this one emphasises the grit of the coal-mine setting, and looks a bit more dramatic than the original. Third place goes to the trilogy of paintings: I tried to created a colour-palette that goes well together across the drawings, and think that succeeded fairly well.
Worst of the bunch: Wearingeul King Lear and Moby Dick. I couldn’t manage to digitally create something worthwhile – the original inkxperiment drawings are a lot better-looking.
I’ve enjoyed myself immensely doing all these ink reviews. And there are still lots of inks on my shelf to continue doing reviews in 2025. I’ve quite some TACCIA and Teranishi inks left to explore, and have recently extended my ink collection with a set of Sailor Manyo inks that I’m excited about. I continue to be surprised by the broad variety of inks that are available for us to enjoy: so much inks to choose from! Great job and a big thank you to all ink makers across the globe! Let’s keep our fingers crossed, and hope that 2025 will bring us some other great new inks to play around with.
[Originally published on the Fountain Pen Network, on 02 January 2025]
inkxplorations 