Blackstone Ink from Just Write in Australia recently released a set of Scents of Australia inks. These inks compliment the older Colours Of Australia lineup. Two of the inks from each set are blue (or are at least called blue) and I wanted to see how they compared to each other. Barrier Reef Blue is one of my favourite sheening inks and Sydney Harbour does pretty well for it self as well.
Read MoreSydney Harbour Blue
Pen & Ink Review: Robert Oster + James Finniss Serendipity β Robert Oster Lake of Fire
in Ink Review, Pen Review
The Serendipity Hybrid Pen is a collaborative pen between James Finniss of Pensive Pens and Robert Oster. The Serendipity is a hybrid between a dip pen and a fountain pen where it functions without a filling mechanism and only operates with whatever ink is in it from dipping the pen. Because, however, it has a standard #6 nib and feed it will hold a lot more ink than a dip nib, even one with a reservoir. Lake of Fire is a new ink in the same colour family as Fire & Ice from Robert Oster's new line of InkArt inks. It came bundled with the Serendipity pen for the first 50 purchasers (but won't be released until later in 2017 on its own).
Read MoreSheen vs Shimmer (and some good sheeners)
Back in 2015 Brian Goulet made a video and accompanying article about sheening inks. I love sheen, in fact it's a major deciding point on whether I grab an ink or not, so this should be something right up my alley, but it wasn't. The article conflated markedly differing ink characteristics, and made quite curious decisions of which inks were chosen to exemplify the topic. He also left a number of very sheening inks off the list that Goulet Pens carry - ignoring the many sheening inks that they don't carry - such as Diamine Bilberry).
The main issue with the article (I'll just talk about the article) is that in it Brian conflated sheen resulting from the ink and shimmer/glitter resulting from particles or pigments in the ink. Now I concede that there isn't a well established term for these 'shimmering' inks. There is and was, however, an established term for the shine resulting from the ink itself: sheen!
(Moving forward I will call them sheen and shimmer)
Read More