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What Brown Can Do for You



Brown ink, that is. Like many of you, I take as much pleasure in exploring new inks as I do in searching for new pens. This amounts to testing a sample of the nearly infinite combinations of pens and inks. Finding just the right ink for each pen is for me one of the more enjoyable aspects of this crazy hobby/passion.

As one would expect, the most commonly used fountain pen inks are innumerable brands and shades of black, blue, and blue-black, clearly subjects for investigation in future entries of this blog. But today let's look at a few of the brown inks I use regularly. I enjoy using shades of brown for portions of lecture notes (usually mathematical proofs) and for grading student papers.

You will notice in the sample above that each ink is used with a different pen. (Clicking on the image will call up a larger image to see the inks more clearly.) I decided not to try a direct comparison by using each ink in the same pen, but rather just to illustrate a few favorite pen and ink combinations. A note on the Noodler's inks: The red-black usually looks less red and more brown in most other pens I've inked with it, but I like the way it looks above even though it is more red than brown; the Walnut, which looks nearly black here, often exhibits in other pens more of a rich brown than the near-black hue seen above.

A word on the paper, which has a big effect on the appearance and behavior of ink. The paper used here is Kokuyo Campus paper, which is very fountain-pen friendly with minimal feathering and bleed-through with most inks. In fact, the two Noodler's inks and the PR Chocolat can be very slow-drying on some papers, but dry pretty quickly on the Kokuyo. In a future post, I'll look at Waterman Havana Brown, Sailor Red-Brown, and couple of others. Any suggestions?

Tool of choice today:
Pilot 78G with medium nib and Private Reserve Chocolat ink

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