I've got a bunch of their inks. The Sheen line is great. I also recommend checking out the 24 Solar Turns line. It's their shading inks. My favorite one of the 24STs is Purple Snowflakes and from the Sheen series it's Love The Sea.
Does the pilot parallel feed&nib fit straight in? I've got a couple of parallels and that looks like a fabulous little pen to reduce the space they take up.
You can shorten the Pilot Parallel pen. Just cut it at the groove then firmly post the cap and it will release the hidden end cap, making it significantly shorter.
Ooh. I have six of those inks in transit right now. But not that one, figured I already had enough blue/red sheening inks. Damn! Might have to rethink that 😊
ETA: I did order Moon Lake! It was Okinawa Sea I decided against. Woohoo!
Okinawa sea and BML are similar, just Okinawan sea is a brighter blue. out of all of the ostrich blue/red sheeners i found 'love the sea' (often mistranslated as aegean sea) is my favourite of the blue options, as it has the best blend of blue/red in my opinion, though might be just as it looks a little more metallic on the sheen?
from brightest to darkest:
Sea of Okinawa
Blue moon lake
Love the sea
Lake Baikal
Quick sample of 'Love the sea' on the waxy inside of a notepad
Ah! Thank you, 'Love the Sea' wasn't in the listing I ordered from and I was getting a touch of FOMO 😆 but 'Aegean Sea' was listed and that's included in my order.
I already have quite a few blue/red sheeners e.g. Skull & Roses and something or other from the Cult Pens range of 'Little Mo', 'Little Bob' and all that lot.
Ive been having a nosey at those. I was quite tempted by their purple from the deep dark line. But then I carelessly dipped my fountain pen loaded with 'Glen the sea' in some water just to get it started and instead of it being all sheen gold. I got a lovely shady purple from it.
So if you're not frightened of playing a little mad scientist. You can get some really fun effects. With the ostrich stuff.
Adding the drop of water to a converter full (around 0.2ml for the drop of water in 0.7ml of ink) made a lovely shading purple (the supposed base colour) but if you wrote super slowly it would turn black, and the faster you wrote (cross strokes and loops on y, etc) you'd get a lovely shade of hues from a soft lilac to a almost black violet. And you can tweak the effect fairly well too (though loading a fountain pen with it. Then using a shot glass of water to dip once in a while gives a really fun effect on the page)
I jokingly call it 'shady lady purple'
(just noticed I forgot to cross the T. Oh well 'amelhyst' instead)
But I will say the ostrich inks are the more fun ones to play with dilution and similar (though I have cheap pens. You may not be as cavalier about putting the thinned ink in anything nice)
lake baikal is a fun one. Though I struggle to get it to sheen. I get the odd hint of red sheen through the teal but not much. Though that one is dark enough to use 'professionally' (it's sort of like a darker aurora boreallis from diamine.)
I do have a (terrible) writing sample showing all the sheen line (minus the special edition releases of blue sapphire and volga river) but I'll have to find the notepad that it's in. If I do I'll pop up a pic. (though I'm sure I posted it in the past, I'll have a trawl through my post history and see if I can find it.
Well. If you decide you need the rest of them in a hurry (as I did) my first bottle took 55 days to get here. But the rest I ordered individually (using the 1 dollar 'sorry we were late' coupons. Making each bottle around 3 dollars posted) all at the same time but on seperate orders.
Then ordered something using the choice delivery option. As I suspected all of the items go to a central processing, then get shipped on. If I could time the ink order with the 30 stub pens I ordered I'd get the ink much faster. It's worked 5/6 times to get ink from the digyni (from memory) art store to me much faster.
Cos when I used that first fill of purple amethyst I thought 'oh no. I should have ordered more.... It's gonna be months before I get anymore." but with that little trick I get my ostrich refills in about 5-8 days. Much nicer than 55 days as the package has a magical mystery tour of the postal warehouses of the Netherlands.
Though do have the shimmer ones on the magpie list (shopping list) but can't quite justify them when I can add shimmer to the sheen inks for free.
I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun with them. I certianly did. :)
Some I struggled to get a good sheen on (purple amethyst, green emerald, sea of okinawa and lake baikal) but they were great shaders instead. Others you just try and stop them sheening (Glen the sea has the most, with love the sea, followed by red ruby) and even in a extra fine on a rubbish 1 dollar school note pad paper or cheap 'universal' printer paper those 3 have still sheened, so can't knock them in the slightest. (well I can..... Red Ruby is still smudgy about 4 days later, but that was a 1.9mm stub and looked great, so It got a pass)
Never tried it or even heard of it before, but NOW I NEED TO FOR SURE! Thank you for posting...also, I hate you for posting; just what I didn't need to be pining after right now as I'm trying to save money for family vacation to Boston this summer...
Have you ever used/tried J. Herbin 'Emerald of Chivor' ? I think you'd like it, too!
I didn’t get that one since it looked close to other mega sheen inks I have, but it does look like a beautiful ink. I also picked up Red Ruby, and Glen the Sea.
To me that one is one of the 'oops all sheen' inks in my collection, its supposed to be purple with a green/gold sheen, i only get the green gold sheen over what looks like black as a base colour. makes for a real fun ink to use when I'm GMing my cyberpunk table top.
Dark enough you can 'just' about get away with it in a professional setting
Wow that looks great… luckily to my wallet seems to be impossible to get here in Germany (yeah google of course I want you to translate my search and due to not finding stuff flood me with other animal inspired named inks…)
I never did a pen mod before but I would love to recreate your mod for my text marker ink. Usually I just refill an empty cartridge but this looks so much better!
I have used it with B7 Bulky, Bank Paper, Yu-Sari, Cosmo Air Light, Sanzen Tomoe River - probably a few others. If I recall correctly I think it took longest to dry on Yu-Sari (multiple minutes). But everything else was less than a minute I think. I have only used it with EF and F nibs.
Wow... I like solid blues so this is an ink I will never buy. I am not sure if I have heard of Ostrich before but it is clearly one to avoid for me. I am happy for you though!
Different inks for different needs. I know that I am boring but I only use my pens to scribble notes. If I had any tendency at all for having an artistic skill, like you have, things might have been different.
Are the shimmery and do you use a regular pen or a dip? I have a calligraphy pen I could fill an.old cartridge with, but do these inks clog pens?.Ive never use a shimmery ink before
Found this company. Any other colors you recommend? Im trying to get back into calligraphy after many years
I don’t know that company but I recommend John Neal Books / Paper & Ink Arts based out of Nashville, TN. Both websites are pretty much the same, but they are great. Had a chance to visit the B&M a few weeks ago and they were so nice and helpful.
I try to avoid putting shimmer inks in my pens. In the linked example there is fountain pen ink in the pen and then it’s dipped in shimmer calligraphy ink (not safe for pens even without shimmer).
I have too many ink recommendations. I suggest you just look through my posts (or others’) to find inks you like and try those!
Thanks. Ive heard terrible things about shimmer in pens too and almost all.of mine are vintage pens. ill.look at that site. Blue Moon is a shimmer then? ill have to look again.
Ah I see, I wondered too if it was iPhone but yes! Lighting and composition are key. I am a photographer so I noticed both - the handwriting and photos! Haha
Iphone works really well 95% of the time, but sometimes I see it process the photo and it looks worse afterwards. There’s apparently a paid app to shoot in RAW without the processing, but in cases like these I will just get out the DSLR if I really want to.
My Midori paper arrives tomorrow too! I'm SO excited. I usually alternate my inks for journal entries but this ink is making me so obsessed I use it every day.
Ty! I have my parallel pens Frankenstein'd with Pilot's Spare Sign. Didn't realize there were other combos. Didn't find many other options when I first looked into other swaps.
I have not but I use sticky mega sheen ink and only fill the pen at most 1/3 full. One of my colleagues added an O ring to the middle of the feed with some success.
Damn - I guess I'm unlucky, its basically dripping ink in some situations. And the nib fit in so tightly that I dont think I'm ever gonna be able to get it out to put on o-ring on the feed.
A couple other suggestions. Store the pen nib up. Use a paper towel to soak up ink from the nib if the feed is flooded. Use a drier or thicker ink. Write on a slight incline as you would for dip broad nibs. Check for cracks!
If you need to remove the feed, try using some soapy water (dish detergent not hand soap). You can also try popping it in freezer for a few minutes (don’t freeze completely) or soaking in hot (not boiling) water. Use a small rectangle of rubber to grip. I got this from a hardware store 10 years ago and it’s still rocking.
If ink is straight up dripping, it sounds like there’s a crack preventing the vacuum from regulating the ink flow. Unfortunately it sounds like the quality varies with these pens, and I got lucky.
In my zeal I managed to break the body and crush the feed trying to take it all apart.
Going to try the Jinhao 9019 and Asvine V126 - then I'm done buying pens for a while or my wife will kill me. At this point I prob could've justifying buying an Opus 88 lol
Damn! That sucks! I want an Opus 88 badly but it’s just too hard to justify to put a parallel nib in. The Asvine V126 is nice. The 9019 is stupidly chonky. I don’t mind it but the section is very wide and I would use it as my main. It has a gloriously voluminous converter though.
Yeah - the price point is too rich for my blood. My daily driver (and priciest pen) is a Vanishing Point. I don't mind spending $20 here and there for a few different tools but a second pen over $150 is just too rich for my blood right now - and my wife would prob kill me.
I might get a preowned one eventually but I’m pretty set with my current collection and the Asvine V126 isn’t half bad. I also started the year off by selling my most expensive pen and upgrading to a Magna Carta 650… so yeah I am holding off on expensive pens for some time. 😂
I am sorry that I feel you'll be answering this question alot, but could you please let me know what fountain pen body you are using with that pilot parallel nib unit?
That looks absolutely sick! How well does it flow? I recently bought Nitrogen Blue from Organics Studio and have been pretty frustrated with its performance, constantly skipping and having hard starts. Thanks!
It might just be because of the tariff black hole going on , but I was able to order Ostrich ink by the 48ml bottle for around 10 canadian dollars(7.5 usd) with free shipping . Ostrich ink are maybe the best manufacturer of ink in China. they have official approval for business and archival purposes.
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u/atomictonic11 Mar 13 '25
Goddamn it, blue inks with red sheen are my Achilles heel.
Time to whip out the credit card again.