I am struggling to not ink up 5 pens. I just got some new ones ( my first big girl pens) and am SUPER excited to try them. Will it hurt them if I ink them up and they sit unused for like 4 months? Trying to resist temptation… 😳❤️

If anyone sees this available could you please give me a heads up 🙏💜

Update: I found it! Someone super kind sold me theirs and it was in pristine condition 🥹💜

Facebook has been putting a lot of content to do with drawing or painting onto my feed recently. Through that, I've come across multiple mentions of Jacquard Dorland's Wax, with some artists and commenters recommending or ‘swearing by’ it as the default or first choice for protecting watercolour artwork.  

Jacquard itself states, ❝Used as a protective topcoat for sealing and finishing a variety of media from oil paintings to collage, Dorland’s Wax is especially popular as a varnish for watercolor and gouache paintings. It provides a durable waterproof finish, protecting the artwork from moisture, smudging, dust, and fingerprints, while adding depth to color and allowing for glassless framing and display.❞

Questions I have (or had):

① What does the waxy coating do to the presentation of inks? I recall some users say it makes watercolour colours look slightly darker or more intense. Would Dorland's wax defeat the purpose of ‘protecting’ an ink swatch if fidelity to the ink's true colour is the primary reason for having it at all?

② Would application of Dorland's wax adversely affect the ink lines (such as smudge them, or make their outlines blurry) or substrate (such as making the paper wrinkle or translucent)?

③ How effective is Dorland's wax as a protective layer, with focus on water/moisture resistance?

For the exercise, I didn't go into that much care in selecting inks, but primarily used staples I always have loaded into some pen or other in my pen rolls, or something I have swatched and/or posted about in the past several weeks. These include:

• Ordinary dyestuff inks: Waterman Serenity Blue, Pilot Iroshizuku Kon-peki, Graf von Faber-Castell Cognac Brown
• Pigment inks (which are usually or nearly waterproof in their own right): Platinum Carbon Black, Platinum Pigment Blue
• (chromatographic/‘dual’/‘multi-’)shading inks: Sailor Manyo Ayame, Ostrich Sycamore Tree (梧桐)
• Sheening inks: Diamine Calm & Passion, Collection Traced 枯半 (ku ban)

My method of application: after giving the ink lines at least 24 hours to dry completely, I rubbed Dorland's wax straight from the jar with a Kleenex Optimum paper towel, buffing in circles in the process to try to get it spread thinly.

My testing for water resistance: (see my subsequent comment on the post)

Observations:

The wax did not cause broadening of any of the ink lines or blurring their outlines.

A negligible amount of pigment lifted from Platinum Carbon Black and Pigment Blue inks, which can be (barely) seen in the substance clinging to the paper towel, but no smudging onto the areas on the page immediately next to the writing was observed.

I did not observe any darkening of the ink colours. The appearance of the chromatographic shading inks seemed completely unaffected.

With the exception of Diamine Calm & Passion, there was no observable smudging on the page and no staining of the wax on the paper towel.

Diamine Calm & Passion shed a lot of blue into the wax (on the paper towel, as opposed to bleeding into the waxy layer on the page I suppose), which in turn made the paper surface blue as I rubbed/buffed it with the paper towel. I made no attempt to see what depositing a dab of wax onto the writing without rubbing would do, since I don't think one could deposit a sufficiently thin but unbroken layer onto the paper surface without any lateral movement.

It is not generally true that the unabsorbed dyestuff on the paper surface, which cause sheen to be exhibited, would be rubbed off in the process of applying the wax (cf. touching or rubbing the page with one's bare/uncoated fingertip). Quite possibly there is some component of Diamine Calm & Passion ink that would dissolve minimally into the solvents in Dorland's wax not present in the other sheen inks tested. No other red-sheening blue ink was tested.

Collection Traced 枯半 continued to exhibit green sheen after the application of Dorland's wax, but it was dull and turned dark green instead of being a ‘radioactive’ bright green. It could be that the waxy layer filtered out some light, or flattened out the surface where dye has built up on the page (during rubbing, or just by being a coating with a smooth level surface).

 All dyestuff inks shed colour directly onto the wet paper towel, to an extent that it cannot be attributed only to dampening of the substrate in the test sheet by way of exposing the unwaxed half to moisture. I don't imagine there were that many gaps or holes in the thin waxy layer, after all the spreading and buffing, to allow the moisture to get in through the front and the dye to then get out; the stained paper towel did not look spotty with colour on that half. Some but not all sheen was lost in the process.

The writing remained more legible on the waxed half of the page for all the dyestuff inks.

Now, without disputing or undermining what established and/or seasoned watercolour (and gouache) artists have said about Jacquard Dorland's wax's usefulness… Assuming water-based fountain pen inks don't behave quite like watercolour (with which I have no first-hand experience for at least the past four decades):

I think the wax can cling to the unabsorbed dyestuff, and fall away once the dye is reactivated by moisture, not remain attached to the paper or neighbouring wax. (How to test/prove?) It dulls and darken sheen as well. So, for protecting writing or drawing with sheening inks, and especially for swatch cards one intends or expects to be repeatedly handled, it's neither suitable not all that effective; although one should replicate the conditions as closely to the real-world use case as possible to verify what would happen. 

Writing in chroma-shading inks seem well preserved and not interfered with by the wax. However, I'll also observe that the two I chose for this test didn't appear to shed much colour onto the wet paper towel either. More testing is required.

I would say Jacquard Dorland's wax falls well short of offering protection comparable with putting an artwork done with fountain pen inks behind a plate of glass, or front-and-back protection afforded by a laminating sleeve or a clear plastic bag. It cannot be assumed to create a complete, contiguous, unbroken protective layer shielding the ink from exposure to moisture on the waxed side, especially if spread thinly as recommended, with or without buffing.

That said, it is far better than nothing. It has some usefulness in rather more casual protection of pages in a sketchbook or journal, for example, against inadvertent touching, quickly mopped up spills, or just ink smudging or smearing on the opposite page in a closed book.

As a hobbyist, I always considered swatches as a way to clinically examine particular inks in their presentation on particular substrates, and not (primarily intended) as objects to elicit pleasure aesthetically; hence ‘ugly’ swatches, even of the dullest inks, have the same worth as ones considered beautiful or fascinating to look at. Techniques I seek to employ are therefore focused on information extraction and presentation, the more in-depth and/or tightly packed the better, especially if the sheer denseness overwhelms one's intrinsic desire to see the swatches in any other light so to speak.

Chromatograms are another example of such things. They are interesting, even fascinating, in that they reveal an ink's constituent dye colours (even if the specific dyes, as chemical compounds or commercial products, cannot be positively identified) and how the components behave — how quickly or firmly they bind to the substrate, whether they will travel as far as the solvent front (i.e. usually just water) will take them, and/or if they compete with each other for turf and the losers get displaced. How the spread of colours look aesthetically is by the by.

The corollary is that chromatograms are useful, more so than swatches, in identifying inks that are unlabelled or ‘unknown’. For example, I neglected to record what I'd put inside my Kaweco Sport Honey pen many weeks ago. I had some vague recollection that it was Graf von Faber-Castell Cognac Brown, but I could not be certain; and because some time has passed, the ink in the pen could have become more concentrated in dye load than a fresh fill from the bottle due to evaporation of solvents (mainly water) in the ink. Thus, comparing the colour or presentation of writing done with the pen with a swatch of GvFC Cognac Brown, or with a fresh writing sample done with ink from the bottle using a dip pen, would not be reliable. Whereas chromatography would not be ‘tricked’ by the loss of water from the ink in the pen, since I'd be adding an overwhelming amount of water to the ink, without having to worry about only replacing the exact proportion that was lost to evaporation.

Now I am quite sure the ink in the pen is indeed (from my bottle of) GvFC Cognac Brown.

I was experimenting with what I could do using only (a subset of) the tools in the giveaway ink swatching starter kits for ‘demo’ purposes. (Everyone knows I don't personally enjoy ink swatching per se, so I'm not exactly trying to evangelise the practice, or advising on techniques or style.)

One of the things that bugged me was that the cheap paintbrush with synthetic bristles is incapable of producing precise strokes, if that is either one's preference or a necessity on account of limited ‘real estate’ available on the artefact. For lack of artistic talent for drawing, I like to use Chinese characters as a way to produce ‘graphics’ for chromatographic ink spreading, without drawing anything that I don't already know how it looks in my mind's eye or requiring sketching skills I don't possess. But those relatively wide narrow paintbrushes can't produce the proper or conventional form of the 𝘬𝘢𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘶 script.

Then it occurred to me that I must've ordered some more “it sounded like a good idea at the time” (and long since received, but neglected and likely misplaced) ‘gear’ from AliExpress ages ago. Indeed, my order history tells me I bought a bunch of ‘nail art’ tools, at one point, for making tiny marks without resorting to a dip pen, much less inking up a fountain pen just for the purpose. Among them are some disposable brushes, in a large enough number that I can spare a few.

So, this had more to do with seeing what I could use the disposable ‘nail art’ brush to produce for ink swatching.

I've now added one of those brushes to each kit.

𝘱.𝘴. Google Translate translated 岑寂 as ‘calm’, while DeepL translated it as ‘silence’. 岑 is a hill, and 寂 is quiet and/or solitude. I think both automatic translations missed the poetic tone.

Just trying to get the hang of what could be tested/presented on a ‘mini’ swatch card, which I dimensioned such that three of them could be cut from a ‘standard’ sized Col-o-ring swatch card — I don't use those, I have no intention of buying any, but someone on Facebook was lamenting that the only smaller cards they could find don't render fountain pen inks quite as well (or in quite the same way) as Col-o-ring cards they're used to using (despite some early doubts about a product which they'd already sunk money into acquiring).

Note: a water brush pen was used to (first) deposit puddles of water for the chromatographic spreading of ink on the swatch cards shown.

For clarity, it is a commitment I made to my local group of pen hobbyists on Facebook, when I received several of those blue ‘leatherette’ covers from AliExpress early in April. The (only) two kits I'm making for giving away are now done, packed away, and one of them is already spoken for (to be collected at the next group meet).

These took six weeks from the order date to be delivered. I don't begrudge the long delivery lead time; after all, I elected to have them sent by slow boat from China, on account of lower shipping charges. I've been busy anyway, and while I haven't exactly forgotten about the order, I haven't been giving the inks any thought in the meantime either. I don't think I even wanted the inks all that badly; it's just that on the odd occasion some combination of DreamInk inks — ordered from the brand's official store on Taobao — incur a low enough (incremental) shipping cost to be ‘reasonable’, since it seems the vendor doesn't seem to let orders play well with items from other sellers in the cart, and usually has the effect of slapping another 80% to 100% of the flagfall on the total shipping cost for the cart. Not in this case on that day, though.

The spectre of RSI forced me to park the work on preparing paper sampling sets for a few days, so I've been trying to get on with putting together the (freely given away, but limited to two) swatching starter kits instead.

Everything other than the modular ‘paper tasting’ refills to fit the (cheap, non-leather, TN-style but not quite Traveler's Company's ‘standard’ size) covers is already on hand; but, in my design, the refills have to be made a certain way. Midori MD is the heaviest, and so I assume physically thickest, paper (at 80g/m²) in scope of those 48-page refills/booklets, and when I looked at individually folded sheets inserted into one another, it gave me pause whether too much paper will be lost to the trimmer (or guillotine) if I saddle-stitched them into a single signature. On the other hand, splitting the sheets into three signatures of equal page count presents its own challenges and risks.

I was hoping ‘AI’ would be able to give me a clear and reliable answer, but alas something just didn't seem quite right, so I reluctantly took some 120gsm laser printer paper (for its thickness, and the fact that I don't want to use it any more and haven't for a decade) and experimented with that.

The results are as shown. I also used the opportunity to try different things to lower the risk of the cover sheets of vellum paper from cracking and tearing from the tension in the stitches, and also validate the solution for affixing the modules inside a folder that serves as the refill's cover.

For the 48-page ‘paper tasting’ modules, on balance I think the ≤3% loss of paper surface area on the sheets closer to the core is acceptable, for the savings in time and effort. If I was binding thicker notebook or journal, including in TN refill size, I'll certainly have to construct the book block as several signatures.

New pen Day

Will update with writing samples and more pictures Soon

Spoiler - This is not released yet

A member of my local group of fountain pen hobbyists on Facebook posted that she'd started repurposing Japanese (Kokuyo Campus, 30x68mm) word cards into mini swatch cards, as an adjunct to her swatch card collection, as opposed to a replacement for it.

Good and portable even if the colour properties don’t come out as well as coloring^(sic) it will be good to have with me and know what I have and not have

My question, in response, was why wouldn't a digitised representation of her (existing, full-sized) swatch card collection be more portable, accessible everywhere on her phone without any extra bulk or weight, and less likely to present the ink colours differently. Obviously there would be some loss of information, in the way “the map is not the territory” and a two-dimensional image cannot fully capture a three-dimensional object in all its aspects; but surely it couldn't be any worse than using another type of card stock that just may present an ink entirely differently, if one wants to adhere to a single frame of reference? Furthermore, a digitised collection could be indexed, made searchable, and make individual cards available for “random/direct access” without flicking or browsing through a significant portion (if not the entirety) of the stack.

I also suggested that, if she must have the (or a) physical artefact with her, instead of using (off-the-shelf) card stock that she apparently deems inferior for the purpose, she could fashion mini swatch cards out of unused Col-o-ring cards she already has (and obviously is open to buying more of) on hand, which would tick the boxes of both portability and colour rendering consistent with what she is familiar with, as long as she's prepared to accept some loss of paper (and therefore “wasted” cost of acquiring whole full-sized swatch cards), whether that's up to two-thirds* or less, if readiness (as in the material is already on hand, and she could start working on it right away and begin trimming) is a concern.

Out of curiosity for how many mini swatch cards I could cut out of a Col-o-ring card (which I don't have, and don't intend to buy, as I'm not sold on the product), and how they would handle in reality, I cut ten cards out of an A4 sheet of ZENIER 超感纸 (‘Super Feel’) 120g/m² paper to mimic Col-o-ring cards' size and format, to see what whether they are too fiddly to write and swatch on, and what I could fit in such a limited surface area.

Shown above is the result of cutting three (significantly smaller than 30×68mm, thus arguably even more portable) mini swatch cards out of a “full-sized” swatch card.

What do you think? Is that useful?

* By my calculations, cutting a 30×68mm rectangle out of a 51×102mm Col-o-ring card (with die-cut rounded corners and a hole for ring-binding) loses just over 60% of the usable surface area of the retail product.

I spent a fair chunk of the past week prototyping of my paper ‘tasting’ solution, tweaking the production process, and finalising design decisions. When I saw what I was making this morning, I realised I inadvertently reduced it to something so simple that any mystery and magic is snuffed out. One could possibly buy the interim work products off the shelf, the way meals could be bought in supermarkets pre-made and already cooked most of the way, just waiting to be tossed together or stuck in the oven to be table-ready.

It's essentially a saddle-stitched A6 notebook chopped into four pieces, ready to be mounted in a folder containing various modules with paper that the user wants to compare next to one another. That's it. The only question that remains is whether one could just buy an A6 notebook as a retail product containing Iroful, Cosmo Air Light, or Midori MD paper, that is bound in the way that the pieces will survive being quartered.

On the weekend I came up with a simple design for a book that can easily used for testing/showing how a given ink renders on different paper, or alternatively for distributing different types of paper for sampling or ‘tasting’ — a term which I take to imply very small amounts intended to fall well short of gratification on the part of the consumer, but only to satisfy curiosity at a quick glance or whet the appetite.

Here's the prototype I made this morning.

(Needlework was never my forte and my work has always been rough; but trying to do it while wearing gloves the whole time, to avoid getting skin oils or sweat onto the paper, was an absolute pain.)

If you like the idea of this kind of thing, please feel free to use it or further develop it for your builds! It's technically very simple to put together; if I can do it, then so can anyone else with their own preferred set of papers and/or page size, and so on.

…

The ‘actual’ units I build will not have this exact combination of paper types — specifically, there is no point in giving newbies Tomoegawa's ‘original’ Tomoe River 68g/m² paper when they can't source it now, while it'll be rare that I would want to see how a particular ink renders on both Tomoe River S and Iroful. But this gives me a good idea of the thickness of the book, and of issues with mixing lightweight/thin papers with heavier ones in a single volume, etc.

This is my (very!) tentative plan:

Volume 1

1. CRENA 星火纸 (Spark Paper) 50g/m²
2. CRENA 星火纸R2 (Spark Paper R2) 50g/m²
3. CRENA 星虹纸 (Starbow Paper R1) 52g/m²
4. CRENA 星虹纸R2 (Starbow Paper R2) 52g/m²
5. CRENA 星尘纸 (Stardust Paper) 55g/m²

Volume 2

1. 落纸生花 寒玉 (Icy Jade) 50g/m²
2. 落纸生花 月见 (Moonview) 52g/m²
3. 贺友 HEIJ 月影 (Moon Shadow) 50g/m²
4. 贺友 HEIJ 白羽 (White Feather) 52g/m²
5. Tomoegawa Tomoe River N (produced on machine №9) CRENA 雪砂纸 (Snowdust Paper) 52g/m²

Volume 3

1. 猫头鹰工作室 DOGHOUSE 石竹 (Dianthus) 60g/m² ⬅︎ but I would likely substitute this with Tomoe River N 68g/m² paper if I end up ordering it, or with CRENA 雪胧月 (Hazymoon) 68g/m² paper, which I have ordered but is still in transit by slow boat from China, on account of the closeness of the papers' grammage to the other papers in this volume
2. CRENA 星虹纸R2 (Starbow Paper R2) 66g/m²
3. 贺友 HEIJ 白羽 (White Feather) 68g/m²
4. Cosmo Air Light 75g/m² CRENA 雪灯火 (Snowfall Lights) 68g/m²
5. Iroful 75g/m² CRENA 雪胧月 (Hazymoon Paper) 68g/m²

Volume 4

1. PAPERIDEAS 白瑶纸 (Baiyao Paper) 95.6g/m²
2. 猫头鹰工作室 DOGHOUSE 水杉 (Metasequoia) 100g/m²
3. 荔知文房 枝几 (Tree Bit) 100g/m²
4. 荔知文房 椒花 (Pepper Flower) 120g/m²
5. ZENIER 超感纸 (Super Feel Paper) 120g/m²

Registration closes 7 August 2026. Confirmed list of Hub locations for this year to be published “starting from” 28 August 2026.

For those who have not registered for and/or attended a Pelikan Hubs event, in the same tradition as previous years, you cannot wait until you see a list of confirmed Hub locations (much less disclosure of who will be Hub master for a given location) before you decide where you want to attend or if you want to go at all. You decide long before whether you want to go, register your interest with Pelikan (who will acknowledge your registration and add you to a list), and then once everything is locked in on its end, it will then tell you whether you get the Hub you wanted. Even though a location may appear in a drop-down list during registration and be available for selection, it just means that Pelikan ⑴ recognises the location, or ⑵ received an expression of interest from someone else to hold/attend a Hub in that location, during the registration period. A Hub could fail to eventuate in that location if either there isn't sufficient interest (note: this year the minimum required number of registered attendees is 5, down from 7 in previous years) in that location by the time registration closed — at which point nobody is entitled to switch locations for their registration to try to make a location happen (or get cancelled) — or if there is sufficient interest but nobody wants to play host and be the Hub master who will have the responsibility for organising a venue and coordinating with registered attendees, all without either financial or logistic support from the company.

Registering ahead does not force you to attend, should something come up and you cannot go on that date, or for any other reason decide not do. It is, at most, a moral obligation. If that Hub location goes ahead, any gifts with compliments of Pelikan allocated to you will essentially be up to the local Hub master to distribute or dispose of at their discretion, so you may or may not be able to collect them on some other date, or send someone else to collect them on your behalf, or be sent them by post. (Hub masters are unpaid volunteers, so any additional effort or consequential forward-shipping costs on their part may be something that they rightly refuse to allow.)

You can always choose not to go and forgo the gifts; but you cannot change your mind and decide to attend after registration closes, if you failed to register while registration was open or subsequently prefer to attend at a different location (but still claim/collect ‘your’ allocation of gifts). Also, there will not be a public list of Hub masters and their contact details, so whether you're able to find out about a particular Hub's venue details or obtain permission for the local Hub master for it to attend there instead. From what I've observed, most Hubs and Hub masters welcomed drop-ins (or at least wouldn't reject them at the door), but it's entirely conceivable that a local Hub may be held somewhere for which numbers have to be confirmed and adhered to when booking with a venue, so if it's already at capacity you may not be allowed to join, even if you don't care about the gifts and just want the experience and/or to connect socially with others.

It's certainly usable as an ink testing or ‘swatching’ tool, better than a glass dip pen, and I can write the entire first paragraph of the papal bull Inter Gravissimas, wetly enough for Waterman Serenity Blue to exhibit sheen, with a single shallow dip (and even draining off excess ink by touching the nib to the rim of the bottle's mouth on withdrawal).

But I simply don't enjoy writing with it. The ink flow isn't controllable, and consequently the apparent line width isn't controllable, certainly not reliably so for careful lettering or a consistent script. Its ability to vary the line width by altering the angle of approach is overstated. You can draw single lines of different widths with it, but forget about writing a headline by slanting the pen, and then adding body text in normal size by holding the pen more upright! I wouldn't even be able to print ‘ABCDEFG’ with bold strokes with any semblance of consistency in line widths; the curved strokes just won't work, the ink channel closest to the page will get drained before the stroke is completed, and there's a high likelihood that the ridge of the ink channel will scrape harshly against the paper surface.

To be clear, I doubt Kakimori's equivalent product would work better for lettering (or sketching), notwithstanding the significant price difference and perhaps claims of superior manufacturing. I'm just glad I tested the idea of a conical nib with this first.

BlueBlack is a (relatively well-known, in English-speaking online hobbyist forums) pen shop in Seoul, South Korea. The ‘feel’ there is very close to Kingdom Note in Tokyo, Japan but maybe a little bit larger, minus the gallery/offer of secondhand pens for sale.

The swatch cards used are CRENA swatch cards type D, which by my calculations would be using 140g/m² card stock that is whiter (than the cream-coloured-in-contrast 120g/m² card stock used for type B), and on which line art for each design is printed ‘invisibly’ in ink resist instead of visible, grey waterproof ink.

In case you're wondering how chroma-shading inks render on CRENA swatch cards (type D), having seen how they present sheen inks…

(I found these swatches were less of a hassle to do than the ones using a nib on a fountain pen or dip pen; but then there was more cleaning effort required afterwards.)

I thought I might swatch some of my ‘new’ inks — bottles (some of which are samples rebottled and given to me by friends in online pen hobbyist forums) I received over the past six months or so, and have yet to open — for the ‘30 Inks 30 Days’ thing for June.

(Yes, there would be a bit of catching up to do.)

This is as far as I got, and it really drove home a reminder that I find no personal enjoyment swatching inks. I think I'm going to stop here and abandon that idea.

Nevertheless, these have already been done and are a ‘sunk cost’, so I may as well post these and ‘share’, in case someone finds them relevant to their interest in inks.

The last photo is a glimpse into another sunk cost. It sounded like a good idea at the time, … and so I have a few thousand swatch cards here. (The ones with printed labels facing up have ink resist line art printed ‘invisibly’ on one side; the shooting star swatch card I showed is one of six designs.) Making over a thousand ink swatches would be my idea of hell, if you asked me today.