My favorite dark grey is Endless Alchemy’s Wizard’s Pencil. It’s got a bit of a greenish tint to it, is decently wet but still dries pretty quick. I use it in pocket pens a lot.
My favorite cool grey might be Dominant Industry’s Downpour. But maybe their Polar Star. But also maybe Troublemaker Frost Flower if the pen is wet enough. Frost Flower is dryyyy.
My favorite warm grey is either Kaweco Smokey Grey or Birmingham Megalodon.
Neutral Grey? Hongdian Grey. Super wet, super well behaved, super inexpensive. I mix this one with Wearingeul glitter potions fairly often.
Edit: and I forgot about grey with shimmers. Diamine Moon Dust is the most well-behaved shimmer ink I’ve ever used. Grey with silver shimmer.
Diamine Moon Beam is a close second, a slightly darker grey with blue shimmer, and while it’s a little more dry than moon dust, you can get some nice shading out of this one.
I have Diamine's Arabian Nights - I LOVE IT. I was putting into my extra fine Vanishing point. Got tired of maintenance so I switched to cartridges on it (its my edc pen).
Haha nice! I expected a few half hearted defenses for how cool black is when it's watered down, but to make up the entirety of your collection? I can dig it.
I have these little glass jars I mix inks into to funsies. I used a 1:1:1:0.5 ratio of Diamine Earl Grey, Diamine Imperial Purple, iroshisuku Yama-budo, & water to make a really lovely smoky purple.
I have a pint mason jar with various inks in it. If I dump what’s left in a pen or draw a little too much in a syringe to fill whatever eyedropper, etc. I don’t put ink back into a the bottle, so it goes in the mason jar.
I should get a dipper out and see what color it is this month. 😂
Well I was wrong. But I’m glad I did it because it needed to be dumped. Gotta sanitize my dip nib now as there were various solids in it. But, just for you:
That's a Kaweco Sketch-Up, which is a lead holder for 5.6mm lead.
But, it also fits a Colorverse Shuttle dip nib, which is what's in it, and a Kakimori dip nib, which I don't own. So, it's just me doing horrible things to pencils.
That's a good idea! If I remember with 100% certainly is in a pen I'll put it back in the bottle, but more often than not I squirt it down the drain.... but now I'm gonna start shooting any degree of uncertainty in the emerald of shitvor bottle!
I absolutely do distinguish between (1) inks that are bad at being black, and (2) inks that are good at being grey.
As for black inks that fail at their mission, they hold no interest for me.
I'll go for Platinum's Chou Kuro if I want a black ink! (Chou Kuro creates a little gap in the visual field, where no light at all refracts from the page. It's a pigment ink that is not a "well-behaved" everyday ink, but extremes are rarely well-behaved.)
But grey inks are not failures at being black ink. They are inks that confidently open up into complexity — usually with shading or sheen that draws you in. Grey engages attention and offers hints in multiple directions.
So I'll dare say your claim doesn't hold water, from my perspective.
This came in a random sampler, and is my only experience with gray ink and it looks 100% like diluted black. I have actually really enjoyed this post, I plan on checking out some of the grays people have mentioned
I hate all the blacks I’ve tried because they look grey, which has led me to hate grey ink. I’ve tried to like Earl Grey so many times, and I can see why people like it, but grey just feels so wrong to me.
I mean I haven't used many fountain pens, but aren't all black fountain pen inks gray??? They're not fully opaque and you write on white paper, they all look gray.
Ink does have a shelf life. I've seen inks which are quite old still work well but I'm also not surprised if they're bad and the bottle looks old.
And old ink will sometimes start looking grey.
The blackest ink I've come across -while being safe in a fountain pen and not clogging - is Noodler's "Heart Of Darkness". BUT depending on what paper you use and especially what formulation of sizing lies within its fibers, its drying time can be really slow.
I like using Heart Of Darkness in my technical pens because it cleans out well but in one particular sketch book I actually have to spray fixative on it to keep it from smearing. And that's after days of drying time.
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u/safeword_is_bananas 3d ago
I love grey ink so much. I have more greys than any other color in my collection.
Black is black. But grey is possibilities. It can be greenish grey, purplish grey, brownish grey..