these beautiful pens

The review I just couldn't put up any longer.

(also starring a Pen of the Year 2008)

As announced in my post about my leather journals I need to show you one of my favourite papers: cotton paper from one of the oldest papermills in Europe, located in Amalfi, Italy, right at the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

Amalfi paper: A notebook, cards, writing paper.

The picture above shows three different kinds of Amalfi paper I have hoarded: the A4-sized 80-90 g/sqm writing paper, a few somewhat heavier folded cards and a little notebook, again with somewhat heavier paper.

One of the most prominent features about this paper is, while all of the edges are deckled, one of them is very rough and looks a bit like cloth or a tissue paper that has been torn apart. It's incredibly soft to the touch.

Cards made of Amalfi paper with a Pen of the Year 2008 on top. Look at the paper's lovely edges.

Yes, I know, this picture reminds of the ad for the Pen of the Year 2008 - but the pen just looks awesome on this delicious paper.

How the paper reacts to fountain pen ink can vary. Whereas the writing paper is very well coated and resistant to bleed through and feathering even with the wettest nibs, some of the card stock can be prone to feathering. For online shopping I can recommend La Scuderia del Duca in Amalfi, they are quick and all the paper and cards I got from there were perfectly well behaved. Especially the ink jet paper is a good deal if you want to make your own notebooks.

The paper is 100% cotton and like all cotton papers I've tried up to date it will soak up a bit more ink than smooth papers, thus making your lines appear thinner. The textured surface might also make your hairlines look a bit shaky, as you can see in the picture below.

Writing Sample on Amalfi paper, done with a semi-flex Swan 3161 and Montblanc Ink of Joy

This surely is the diva kind of paper, but I just love the look of ink on cotton paper - if the pens decide to write on it. Not all of them do, they will start with a nice lush ink flow but within a few lines the flow will cease and there will be skipping. From my personal experience Pelikan and Nakaya nibs will handle the paper very well, Montblanc nibs will provide varying results and Danitrios nearly always fail on it. So if you want to write a nice long letter on Amalfi paper with your favorite pen it's a good idea to try first if the pen will do the job on this paper.
Each sheet is watermarked, even the cards, though the watermarks can vary. This is the watermark on my writing paper. As you can see the paper is taking the ink well even on the watermark.

Amalfi paper watermark.

It's also great for watercolour or water-ink-painting. Not sure if it's the cotton or the surface texture, in any case the colours will appear more vibrant than on other papers I've tried.

Poems by Hilde Domin ("Einhorn") and Rainer Maria Rilke ("Herbsttag").

And it's that time of the year coming up again.

As may be obvious, I love beautiful things and sometimes I will grab them despite I can't put them to any immediate use. Blank cards are an example - Crown Mill does them, Zerkall, Amalfi and many more. They are lovely thick paper with matching envelopes, often lined with tissue paper, making a delicious rustling sound to the touch. So two to three dozen cards have accumulated here and, unlike writing paper, they hardly ever get any use.

Writing a letter is one thing, but a card will run out of space at the moment you've discovered you do indeed have something to say. On the other hand I feel that for the shortest of short notes, like "Happy Birthday" or "Merry Christmas", an unprinted card is oddly out of place.

Diamine Ancient Copper plus some water. Shades like heaven.

Still the idea to decorate my own cards didn't occur to me until a few weeks ago when I was looking at a few hideously expensive minimalist christmas cards online.
For as long as I can remember the urge to draw and paint something has raised its tousled head within me every once in a while, usually getting whacked on said head by me and, over time, disappearing again - but this time I gave it a go. I used fountain pens with different inks and nib sizes and a crappy discarded make-up brush (I've discarded that one for good now so it's not depicted ;)).

As any fountain pen user probably knows, non-waterproof ink and water gives a huge bang which cannot be heard but seen. The ink will spread on the paper in an uncontrollable but very charming way. Up to now, every ink I tried has looked fantastic though they do lose some vibrancy when dried.

Hand decorated Christmas card on Roessler Büttenpapier (moulded paper) cardstock: Diamine Ancient Copper, Montblanc Ink of Joy, Diamine Ochre

The really cool thing is that you don't have to be "artsy" to pull this off, for which I am living proof. Everyone is familiar with the shape of an angel or a christmas tree. You don't even need to master symmetry because you can decide to only sketch one side of the motif and that will work just as well.

The card above was the first one I made, in retrospect I think I overdid it a little with the brush but well, I still like it and for sure it's better paper than most ready made cards you can buy. For colouring I used almost 100% Diamine Ancient Copper plus a little Montblanc Ink of Joy for the halo and Diamine Ochre for the writing.

Hand decorated Christmas card on Zerkall Büttenpapier (moulded paper) cardstock: Diamine Sherwood Green, J. Herbin 1670 Rouge Hématite.

Besides helping me to get along with my Christmas mail, the making of these cards also gave the part of me that wants to draw and paint the opportunity to build up a toehold and take a good look around, so there's some chance you'll be seeing more of that in time, with fountain pens and without.

It's hard to imagine a world without a ballpoint pen. It's a world where there are pencils - traditional and mechanical ones - and fountain pens. If you want your writing to last there's not much of a choice.

Consequently there was a lot more to choose from in terms of fountain pens a mere 100 years back, especially there were many more inexpensive models since everybody needed a fountain pen. There were flexible nibs and a wide range of filling systems - eyedropper, piston fillers and especially a range of filling systems with a rubber sac inside the pen's barrel and some means to compress the sac and suck ink into the pen upon releasing the pressure. Today these filling systems have almost disappeared except for some nostalgic editions - like the Stipula Saturno.

Stipula Saturno Crescent Filler

The Crescent filler is one of those long gone filling systems. Before I got the pen I wondered how it would be operated. Would you pull the crescent out, or twist it some way? In reality it's really simple. The ring that goes around the barrel has a gap in it. To fill it, you move the gap underneath the crescent, then press down on it and it will compress the sac. After filling you can turn the ring back into a position where it blocks any movement of the crescent so the pen cannot empty itself accidentally in your purse.

Besides being easy to handle it's also very decorative. Since the pen itself is not a fatty it will still fit in most pen pouches despite the filler crescent on the barrel.

Stipula Saturno Crescent Filler

The Saturno is about the length of a Pelikan M1000, but somewhat slimmer and lighter. It's ebonite, which is no less than fitting for a nostalgia pen. I'm not really a huge fan of ebonite (except when covered with Urushi), but I readily admit it can look gorgeous and the smell, which I'm not a fan of, luckily has already evaporated. It has its disadvantages though, the main one being that colour and luster fade over time, as can already be seen on this one right behind the cap threads.

The Saturnos have been sold out for a while. They came in brown, blue-green and black-yellow and probably some other shades I don't know about. Black-yellow is relatively easy to come by but I had to look for a while to find one in a colour I like better - I got this one from a fellow FPN member in the US. The blue-green is gorgeous. I have a thing for colours which are in-between, this one can't decide between the deep Sea and a dark forest.

Stipula Saturno Crescent Filler

The nib is a very pretty 0.9 stub, worked on by Greg Minuskin - which is funny, despite I wouldn't send a pen to the US for nibmeister services this is my second Minuskin nib already. I'm not sorry, I like the nice, lush ink flow his nibs usually have - as does this one.

Pen & Brush Doodles

A quick drawing with Diamine Ancient Copper and Diamine Midnight to illustrate how fountain pen ink behaves when diluted with water. The colours love to mix and create interesting patterns. A bit of their vibrancy is lost when dried but there's still a fair amount of colour left.

Quick sketch with fountain pen ink and water

Some colours dissolve easier than others, the Midnight, which is a very dark blue, washes away to almost nothing even though I used a flex pen and some pressure, whereas the outline of the left thigh in Ancient Copper is still clearly visible under the generous wash of water that went over it.
Also the colours don't become permanent like watercolour so they're harder to layer. Still, to sketch, then use a bit of water and bam! Clouds of colour exploding, that's really neat.

There are watercolour pencils and even ink pencils which are designed for a similar purpose but can't quite deliver the same effect. They have other advantages however, like easier layering.

Here's fountain pen ink next to a Faber-Castell ArtGrip watercolour pencil and a Derwent Inktense ink pencil. I tried to put roughly the same amount of pigment on the paper with the two pencils, even taking the lighter colour into account the watercolour pencil is very pale when washed over with water, the Inktense pencil releases its pigments somewhat more readily but in this respect they're both absolutely no match for the fountain pen ink. It seems like you could do a light wash over half the page with the amount of colour provided by that tiny doodle.

A snapshot I'd like to share. It's a lovely, large pen - and not what it seems!

Disclosure of the mystery and more pictures next week.

Looking at the file names won't help. ;)

Edit: The mystery is now unveiled. ;) More pictures and info on the pen can be found here.

Occasionally - in fact, sometimes I think it's more often than not - it's not perfection that turns a nice thing into a great thing but the carefully placed imperfections in it. I've heard that Arabian carpet weavers purposefully put some mistakes into their work because they believe no human is able - and allowed - to claim perfection.

(I think this isn't a bad approach at all, though I'm not sharing the religious background. Why not carefully put a few mistakes into your letter, your painting, your crafting project? That would take so much pressure away.)

Nakaya Negoro shiro-tame nuri

With this pen, Nakaya has gone a deliberate step farther and added not only imperfections but downright destructed elements to their work of art. Flawless planes of amber-coloured lacquer are broken here and there where the surface appears to have cracked, jagged outlines exposing the dull ebonite underneath.

This doesn't only look cool - to me anyway - but also feels interesting to the touch. It becomes apparent how thick the lacquer layer - or in fact, the many layers - on the ebonite corpus actually is, that it really is thinner at the gripping section, that most of the lacquer seems to be very light with only a slight touch of a dark varnish over it.

Nakaya Negoro shiro-tame nuri

This model is the mid-sized Portable Writer. The Negoro design is often done on a Piccolo, which I was a bit ambivalent about because, though I do like the Piccolo, I sometimes catch myself thinking "Hey, a bunch of money and all I'm going to get is such a small pen?". (Yes, that's irrational, absolutely! But well, at the moment that I decided to take the plunge on a Negoro and found out that nibs.com had one on a Portable size, I didn't take too long to make up my mind.)

Nakaya Negoro shiro-tame nuri

Love these cracks. They seem to enhance the glossy surface rather than destroy it.

Nakaya Negoro shiro-tame nuri

The only thing I am a little ambivalent about on this pen - and this may come as a surprise - is the clip. I'm having a love/hate-relationship to clips, because despite I hardly ever clip the pens to anything and especially the Nakaya clips are not really beautiful to my eye, I appreciate their stopping the pen from rolling around. Yes, Nakaya do roll stoppers, but they're definitely not my cup of tea.

On the Negoro, I decided to go for the clip. That skilfully placed crack near the clip band.

Nakaya Negoro shiro-tame nuri and Montblanc 149

I also decided I'm going to do more size comparisons in the future because I always find them extremely helpful myself when reading about pens I don't know about. Here's next to a Montblanc 149, the Montblanc is a little fatter - though this Portable is actually quite a lot fatter than my other Nakayas, their sizes always varying a bit because they are hand turned - but else there's not much difference here. The Nakaya is a little lighter than the Montblanc when capped but a little heavier when uncapped. The cap doesn't post.

The nib is a plain gold 0.9 mm stub done by John Mottishaw. Like all my pens I've got from him so far it works flawlessly, juicy and smooth, and this width is my favourite. I already have a cursive italic from him in the same size, I'll compare them some time.

Like all Nakayas, it's a c/c filler. Currently inked with Sailor Jentle Rikyu Cha (I have to write more about this ink sometime. This ink...! When I tried it first I thought "uh, mud". But it's so much more than that. There's green in it, olive, brown shading... I'll show you.)

... which is why I need these pictures on a cold, grey and dark winter's morning like this one. The deep and vibrant colours, the wet-look glossy surface. Maybe you'll enjoy it as well, whatever the weather.

Danitrios, Nakayas and a Platinum Izumo.

Danitrios and Nakayas (and a savage dragon).

Mystery Pen Unveiled

There are surfaces which love light, drink it, bathe in it while back in the shade they look subdued and dark. This also goes for pen's surfaces. Dark tame-nuri or tame-midori is an example, it can look almost black except when hit by a ray of sunlight (or a studio flash).

But then there's also those which start to shine when the light gets dim, like this Danitrio Mae West kawari-nuri which doesn't unfold its full charm in the sunlight.

Raden is another example, too much light and it looks dull. Put a Raden pen in a dimly lit spot and it will sparkle in the darkness like the neon lights of a nightly city.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight and Namiki Yukari Nightline Moonlight

That the Mystery Pen was a Raden pen was easily discernible. Raden is a Japanese technique where pieces of abalone shell - beautiful colourful mother of pearl from Sea snails -, is attached to a surface with clear Urushi lacquer. It's often used in combination with maki-e and is a traditional Japanese art form. What makes the mystery pen all the more interesting is that it is a German pen, a Pelikan, to be accurate.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight

The artwork, for which Pelikan employed a Japenese artist, Mr. Norio Matsuda, is done on the body of a Souverän M1000 as a limited edition from 2011. Raden work requires a lot of experience and patience. It's flawless. Mainly abalone pieces with a blue or green shimmer were picked to give an impression of cool moonlight, though their spectrum will also include a fair portion of purple depending on the viewing angle.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight

I posted this picture already but I'll have to show it again because it shows the abalone's lovely surface so clearly. Look at those ripples, like waves in a grotto or under a strange moon. The abalone stripes, though, are perfectly straight. It's all optics.

Pelikan M1000 Moonlight

The great thing about this pen is that it can always be your daily writer no matter what nib you feel like using. As with all Souveräns, you can always switch the nib yourself quickly and easily. This one is a BB nib, ground to cursive italic by John Sorowka.

I felt that it was time to do a review of this pen, not only because I like it so much but also because there's not a whole lot of info around about this pen since so few pieces were made and the owners seem to prefer to keep quiet about it.

To see such large pieces of Raden on a pen seems to be relatively rare. More frequently what seems like a large pieces is many minute Raden fragments put together mosaic style. When I get to it I'll show some more examples of how it can be used. It's a fascinating topic. I don't know if I will ever feel old enough to wear pearls, but mother of pearl on pens... or the pearl on the Montblanc Greta Garbo ... that's another story altogether.

When I used to think about drawing, a lot of things came to mind with which to do it. Graphite, charcoal, pastels, maybe even a fineliner or a biro.

During the last weeks this view has shifted a bit. I still love pencils and especially my Derwent Inktense pencils and blocks (especially the blocks are awesome, the colours seem to explode once touched by water - if you like watercolour pencils you should definitely try those), but then I started to doodle with my fountain pens and I'm really enjoying this rather a lot.

For writing I love broad nibs, but I have a couple of fine ones too and they always come in handy on occasions like these - even better if they're flexible.

If wishes were fishes... we'd all cast nets.

The above was done with a Waterman Ideal and Diamine Majestic Blue ink (though that one's far from ideal because it doesn't flow well enough - and while drawing, a hard starting pen is even more annoying than while writing) on a Midori Traveler's Notebook sketchbook refill. I bought that refill before it crossed my mind I would really fill a lot of pages with drawings and I certainly won't buy one of those again for the paper is a major letdown in my opinion. It's supposed to take ink and watercolour well but there is a lot of bleed through with either of them and also feathering when using the smallest amount of flex.
(That iris is actually circular, by the way. It just looks odd on the picture. Someone needs to whip my shooting perspective into line.)

I want a strange doll for Christmas.

This one was done with a fine-nibbed Pelikan M800 and Montblanc Midnight Blue on cartridge paper, which also shows a little bleed-through on ink heavy spots like the pupil but is okay overall. Being not really my cup of tea for writing - too boring -, I like Midnight Blue quite a lot for sketches, it's a nice colour and doesn't smudge when dry. It's also a bit more water resistant than most inks though it still will wash out quite much when washed over with a wet paintbrush.

Do you know a truly waterproof fountain pen ink? This never really mattered to me before so I hardly know anything about them. The only ink that really took well to being painted over with watercolours was india ink, but that means a dip pen. Meh.

... done on a Danitrio Genkai. Definitely one of my most eye-catching pens, for the size as well as for the striking pattern. More to come.

A Danitrio Genkai in seirei-nuri Urushi amidst Nakayas.

Happy 2013 everyone!

This is one of my two Genkai pens and one of the three largest ones I own, the other one being a Sailor Susutake. These are large pens, probably made with the thought of a generous canvas for maki-e artwork in mind (which is as amazing as it is out of reach).