In Ink Review

Ink Review: Colorverse Ink Andromeda #16, Einstein Ring #04 and Lights on Ceres #05

Author AnaPosted on 5 Comments
Ink Review: Colorverse Ink Andromeda #16, Einstein Ring #04 and Lights on Ceres #05

(This is part four of a series of reviews about the new Colorverse ink line. Please refer to the overview for details about the whole collection.)

Continuing with the grouped reviews of Colorverse inks, today I am going to go through the purple-pinks I bought. I know a lot of people were waiting on these so thanks for your patience, I know they will be worth the wait.

For information about the packaging and an overview of the Colorverse, please see the overview from the beginning of the week.

I got three pink-purple colors in the first batch of Colorverse Inks: Einstein Ring #04 and Lights on Ceres #05 from Season One: Spaceward and Andromeda #16 from Season Two: Astrophysics (ignore the “Season 1” written on my swatch).

Lights on Ceres is definitely the lightest of the three colors and my first thought was that it might be this year’s Callifolio Andrinople. With the new Lamy AL-Star release in Hot Pink this year, Lights on Ceres might also be a good match so I’ll be curious to see how similar the Lamy Hot Pink ink is to Light on Ceres, though Light on Ceres does not have any of the sheen that is being seen in early swatch samples of Lamy Hot Pink.

Einstein Ring is a deep raspberry-purple color with a distinct gold sheen. I think the Pantone chip is a pretty good match too.

And, hello Andromeda! I admit, this was the first bottle I opened. Andromeda is more magenta raspberry than Einstein Ring and the sheen is very apparent gold to gold-green like a lovely patina. There is a lot of color similarity though in hue between Andromeda and Einstein Ring so most people probably will want to choose one or the other but not both.

In writing, you can see that Andromeda and Einstein Ring start to look a lot more similar. If you prefer a bit darker, more purple ink, you may prefer Einstein Ring. If you like your purples a little more on the pink side, than Andromeda will be more to your taste. If you want more sheen, Andromeda will appeal more. And if you are wanting the pinkest of the Colorverse colors, than Lights on Ceres though it shades beautifully, it does not have any noticeable sheen.

Compared to some other inks, Einstein Ring is probably closest in hue to R&K Alt. Bordeaux. Private Reserve Arabian Rose is a pinkier and Diamine Syrah is more red.

Even with my epic ink stash, I had a hard time finding another ink that was the same color as Andromeda and nothing in my collection had the same sheen that it has. R&K Magenta or Callifolio Grenat is close in hue but no sheen.

And finally, does Lights on Ceres compete with Callifolio Andrinople? I think it does though I think Lights on Ceres is a little redder. If you do want a pinky-red that sheens though Pelikan Edelstein Turmaline sheens gold in a similar hue range.

Overall, Andromeda is a clear winner and I really like Lights on Ceres. Einstein Ring is a good deep purple-red but I do feel most people would choose either Andromeda or Einstein Ring and not buy both like me. But go crazy. Like loves like.

Tomorrow… we go a little crazy!

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Pencil Sharpener Review: KUM Lefty Aluminum Can Sharpener

Author AnaPosted on 4 Comments

Review by Tina Koyama

Ana warned me. 

When I said I wanted to review the Kum Lefty Aluminum Can pencil sharpener, she said she had found it difficult to get used to reversing her hand when she used a sharpener made for lefties.

I was so tickled to see any sharpener made for lefties that I wanted to give the Kum can a try. And there was another reason that made me want to give it a shot: It has two hole sizes, and I’ve had good luck with conventional two-hole Kum sharpeners that accommodate my larger-barreled colored pencils. 

But dang it – Ana was right. Even though my hand is twisting in the natural direction, it feels all wrong! (Argh! We lefties spend our lives adapting to a righty world, so when something is made lefty for us, we have to re-adapt to being ourselves! End of self-righteous, I mean, self-leftist rant.)

Rant notwithstanding, I decided to give the sharpener a fair shake. Before I get to its function, though, let’s look at its design, which is strange, to say the least. It’s literally a small can that sternly proclaims, “for left-handers only.”

KUM Lefty Can Sharpener

The plastic pop-off top has a double plug (to match the double holes) that is awkwardly attached to the lid with what reminds me of the plastic tether attaching a hang tag to clothing. It does prevent shavings from leaking out of the holes, though.

Kum lefty 2-hole can sharpener

Once you remove the lid, the wedge-shaped sharpener, attached to the lid, is revealed. It looks identical to other Kum double-hole sharpeners – except the blades are reversed, of course. The lid keeps all shavings neatly inside the can, which has a larger capacity than most portable sharpeners. The lid is secure, and I’m confident that it wouldn’t pop off inadvertently in my bag.

Kum Lefty Can Sharpener open

I gave the Kum lefty my usual test pencils: a Blackwing (standard diameter), a Caran d’Ache Museum Aquarelle colored pencil (slightly larger than standard), and a Derwent drawing pencil, which has an even larger barrel. The Blackwing fits in the smaller hole and, as I’d hoped, both the Caran d’Ache and the Derwent fit in the larger hole. I was pleased to find that all three sharpened up very nicely. The Blackwing didn’t get a long point, but the average-length point is perfectly serviceable. For my purposes, it’s more important that the thick cores on the two colored pencils sharpened evenly and smoothly.

Kum Lefty pencil sharpener pencils tested

Though its appearance and design leave much be desired (Is it supposed to look nostalgic? Klutzy, as lefties are stereotyped to be? Or just ugly in a normal kind of way? I’m stumped), it does the job – and the job can be done with my left hand in a natural direction. Now I just have to train my left hand to remember what natural is.

tina-koyamaTina Koyama is an urban sketcher in Seattle. Her blog is Fueled by Clouds & Coffee, and you can follow her on Instagram as Miatagrrl.

DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by JetPens for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.

In Link Love

Link Love: Chinese Pen New Year!

Author AnaPosted on Leave a comment
Link Love: Chinese Pen New Year!

Posts of the Week:

I am really enjoying learning more about the world of Chinese pens through the posts on Frank Underwater’s site.  And with Chinese New Year just around the corner, it seemed perfectly appropriate to celebrate them, Check out his two posts this week:

Pens:

Ink:

Paper & Notebooks:

InCoWriMo & Letter-Writing:

Art Supplies & Art:

Other Interesting Things:

In Ink Review

Ink Review: Colorverse Proxima B, Saturn V & Crystal Planet

Author AnaPosted on 6 Comments
Ink Review: Colorverse Proxima B, Saturn V & Crystal Planet

(This is part three of a series of reviews about the new Colorverse ink line. Please refer to the overview for details about the whole collection.)

For the second collection of Colorverse that I’m going to review, I decided to focus on the blues. I got all three shades of blue from the Season One: Spaceward Collection — #2 Proxima B, #3 Saturn V and #12 Crystal Planet. All three of these colors come with the two matching bottles of dye-based ink, one 15ml and one 65ml bottle. For more details about the overall packaging and bottle design, check out the overview post about the Colorverse collection.

Proxima B is the darkest color and best described as a blue-black. For the purposes of Colorverse’s spacey theme, it’s their deep space color. Saturn V is the steely-eyed missile man blue. This is the ink color that should have been found in every Parker 51 on every desk at NASA in the 60s.

And Crystal Planet just blows my freakin’ mind.  It’s a luminous blue.

I took more close-up shots of the swatch cards to see color shading, sheen and detail. Proxima B is deep and rich with a little bit of shading but not much.

Saturn V has some reddish sheen and some shading but is still a dark rich “all business” blue.

Crystal Planet is so freakin’ bright with a max-q payload velocity magenta sheen that would make Elon Musk lose signal. Suffice it to say, its makes your eyes bleed and Yves Klein cry.

The blue-black ink channel is as deep as it is wide so its pretty hard to do something truly outstanding here. If you don’t own any blue blacks or you love blue blacks and you’re looking to add another to the pile, don’t let me stop you. Proxima B is a lovely option. But, if like me, you already have a half a dozen or more 50ml+ bottles in your stash, its going to be pretty hard to make a strong case for buying TWO more bottles of Proxima B.

Saturn V is so close to Parker Quink Blue Black, down to the reddish sheen that I feel a little guilty recommending spending three times as much money on Colorverse unless you like me are a big space nerd and want to be able to say you’re using “Saturn V”. So, my earlier comment about Saturn V being “steel-eyed missile man blue” and the Parker 51 reference? Totally accurate. So, Colorverse nailed the color and not many other companies have.

As for Crystal Planet, luminous blue is a lofty goal that many inks have attempted but each have landed in a slightly different place. I think Crystal Planet has carved out its own unique space. I included Private Reserve Cobalt which is a color I know many have liked but the overall performance of Private Reserve inks have been unstable so Crystal Planet may make a more stable alternative. Especially with the detailed information that Colorverse has been providing about their ph information and other color and chemical properties. Crystal Planet is listed as having a ph of 8.4 which, according to Richard Binder’s tests, is on par with Apache Sunset and Pilot Iroshizuku Take-Sumi. I feel fairly certain that that bodes well for the overall performance for Crystal Planet.

With the three blues from Season One: Spaceward, I wholeheartedly recommend Crystal Planet. It’s amazing. Saturn V is a lovely sheening, business blue but its a clone for Parker Quink Blue Black. Mind you, the bottle for Saturn V is much cooler so if you can rationalize that and the extra mini bottle, go for it. Proxima B is competing is a very tough field. There are dozens of blue blacks and if you gotta catch ’em all, don’t let me stop you but at $36 a set, there are other colors in the Colorverse.

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In Ink Review

Ink Review: Colorverse Mars Curiosity, Hubble Zoom & Space Laika

Author AnaPosted on 15 Comments
Ink Review: Colorverse Mars Curiosity, Hubble Zoom & Space Laika

(This is part two of a series of reviews about the new Colorverse ink line. Please refer to the overview for details about the whole collection.)

It was so hard to decide which set of Colorverse ink colors to review first so I decided to go with the colors I was most surprised about. First, I don’t actually remembering ordering a couple of these. I think I hit ink ordering mania and was just clicking on everything.  But secondly, I was pleasantly surprised about the colors of these inks. They are not usually colors I gravitate towards (space pun intended!) and I actually ended up really liking them which is a good thing since I now have two bottles of each!

For an ink collection about space, #6 Space Laika, #7 Hubble Zoom and #8 Mars Curiosity (each $36 per two-bottle set) are all decidedly earthy colors. I was able to include Pantone chips for all the colors except PMS2035U for Mars Curiosity because I didn’t have it. I think the chip for Hubble Zoom is pretty close but I’m not sure the chip for Space Laika is quite right.

But the big excitement was the sheen on Mars Curiosity! It looks like the silvery dust on the surface of Mars! I am mesmerized!

Hubble Zoom does not have any sheen per se, but the color has a lot of shading and is a rich, warm mahogany color. I wouldn’t call it red or brown or burgundy. It’s lovely.

And Space Laika was a freaking Communist Revolution. Its a brown I actually like. Its a warm rich brown that doesn’t go too cool. You want that rich Chocolate Lab brown? This is it.

 

In writing, Mars Curiosity writes bright red and then dries darker with its signature silvery sheen. Hubble Zoom is a lighter, warmer red-brown in writing and Space Laika is that fab cocoa brown that makes me want to sing the soundtrack to Dogs in Space all day.

Finding ink swatch comparisons to Mars Curiosity was a challenge as it turns out I don’t have a lot of deep orange inks in my collection. (Over 300 inks and red-oranges aren’t amongst them!) So, what I had to reference was  very limited but I also think that Mars Curiosity is in a class by itself with the silvery sheen so take that into consideration. I have Apache Sunset and its way more orange than Mars Curiosity and not even in the same field. Most of the colors I had were too orange or too red. Mars Curiosity is really a curiosity.

When it came to finding ink comparisons for Space Laika and Hubble Zoom, I faced a similar struggle finding a good range of comparison inks too. Both were different enough on the color specturm that is was more aboutfinding contrasts this time rather than similarities.

I went ahead and tried to dive a little more deeply into understanding more about ph levels today. I know its important to have a working knowledge about the acidity or alkalinity of inks but I tend to care more about staining, water solubility,  fade-ability and fluidity first. My chemistry skills being what they are, I’ve always left the more technical aspects of ink reviews to people who are more savvy than I am. But since Colorverse has been so kind as to provide ph information, I decided I might as well figure out what they mean.

So, I went over to Richard Binder’s site and found out that the ph level of distilled water is 7.  He worked with someone who tested a range of common inks to get a good idea of alkaline and acidic inks ranging from 1.5 to 9.7.

On the Colorverse pamphlet included with the inks, they list the ph for Space Laika at 8.4, Hubble Zoom at 9.3, and Mars Curiosity at 8.6. The Colorverse inks seems to be in the same range as Sailor and Pilot Iroshizuku. While that is not super scientific, I feel fairly confident that anything I write or draw will survive my lifetime if protected from the light and water. Beyond that… who knows?

So, those are the earthy tones from my first fourteen colors. Tomorrow….we go blue!

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In Ink Review

Colorverse Inks Overview

Author AnaPosted on 11 Comments
Colorverse Inks Overview

I thought I’d start my massive review series of the Colorverse Ink collection ($36 per set) with an overview of the product. If you’re not familiar with Colorverse inks yet, they have recently come onto the pen and ink scene by way of Korea. The original series of inks, Season 1, started as a Kickstarter and then a Season 2 line of colors was added. In January of this year, the most recent Season 3 colors was launched a set of six companion sets of colors.

One of the most notable things about the Colorverse Ink collection is that each box comes with two bottles of ink. In the Season 1 & 2 sets, its a matched set of 65ml and 15ml bottles of the same color. In Season 3, this becomes a large 65ml bottle of a focal color and a 15ml bottle of a “special” color — maybe a shimmering metallic, a pigment ink or just a contrasting dye-based ink.

The packaging for the Colorverse Inks is amazing and if you are the least bit science or space-inclined, you’re going to be hard-pressed to pass up a box or two of these inks. Inside each box is star char graphics, a brochure featuring the rest of the lines of ink and sticker and accessory pack.

The accessory pack includes stickers, a paper bookmark, a foldable paper pen stand and a branded napkin for clean-up. The first reaction for many about the Colorverse ink collection was the price but I think these little extras prove that they are definitely making it worth the slightly higher price. Caran d’Ache inks are almost the same price and you don’t get stickers or toys in the box. Nor do you get an extra bonus bottle of ink that you can share or keep at work.

The one thing I did discover about the smaller bottle is that the opening is not particularly conducive to larger pens or dipping a dip pen into the bottle as most holders are too large to fit into the opening. So, the smaller bottle will require a pipette, a syringe or other transfer method to be used efficiently. The larger bottle has an opening that is much bigger and accommodates most pens easily. Whether it will be easy to get the last drops from the bottom of the bottle is still something I’ll have to determine but I think it will be a long time before I need to worry about that.

I wanted to give a size comparison of the bottles with some commonly recognized bottles for scale.

So… ready to see some of my early color swatches?

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In news

Housekeeping: Ink Reviews & Pen Shows

Author AnaPosted on 10 Comments

Just thought I’d drop a little housekeeping post today to let everybody know what’s going on around here.

Ink Review Week

First, between Laura and I, there are going to be a ton of ink reviews in the next week or so. I have over a dozen Colorverse inks to review which I’ve decided to group into color families so you don’t have to wait a month to get to see them all. Laura will be bringing in some Monteverde reviews as well as some Diamine Shimmering inks so hopefully we will have something for everyone. We want to get them out before we head off to LA!

Pen Shows

Next up, in the sidebar, I have reactivated the Pen Show Countdown. Its like “Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?” the Well-Appointed Desk Edition. We are counting down the days to the LA Pen Show. Laura and I are headed out to LA and as I am looking outside to whiteout blizzard conditions here in Kansas City, California is sounding better and better.  I’ll try to keep it up for all the shows I’ll be attending this year which will include Arkansas, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, DC, San Francisco and Dallas thus far — with LA being the first of the year for me.

Col-o-ring Ink Testing Books

I noticed that there were a lot of people on the Col-o-ring mailing list. If you are waiting to order one, they are currently available from our online shop! Col-o-ring Ink Testing Books are also available through  many of our favorite online retailers in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia/NZ and soon even Korea! We’ll let you know as info is available.

We have other products and ideas in the works as well and will post them here on the site and unveil them at future pen shows. Stay tuned!

Some Questions

I want to ask you, lovely readers, is there something you’d like to see more of here on the blog? It was suggested that I should consider doing more videos but, of what? Reviews? How-to’s? Ask the Desk Q&As? Interviews? Do you want more pen reviews? Paper reviews? Behind the scenes? More cat photos? Everybody wants more cat photos, right?

Seriously, if there’s something lacking or a product, brand or company you think we neglect here on The Desk, leave a note in the comments and we will start to build a list of posts we can do in the future.

In the meantime, I’ll be in the studio…