@AnasaziWrites - Louie may be a beast, but you can tell that he's a very good boy!
@Cyril Jayant - Snoopy too!
Thank you,
@Erica McPhee and
@Lucie Y and everyone else for your kind thoughts about me finally getting a presentable R for Remove.
Lucie - your dedication to your art and building your skills is an inspiration to us all! You totally deserve to treat yourself to some beautiful inks!
* The packaging on Ferris Wheel Press products is really spectacular (but you also pay a premium for it). I have several of their inks, but also a couple complaints about the packaging that kind of keeps me from buying more of them - 1. beautiful though it may be, the shape of the bottles makes them very tippy, and I'm always terrified that I'm going to knock them over (38ml is disc-shaped with a narrow base; 20ml or 80ml is spherical with a tiny base); and 2. the mouth of the jar is very very small, which makes it hard to fill a fountain pen from them (and also makes it more likely that I'll tip it over in the process). You can see Nick Stewart complain about this on his blog:
https://nickstewart.ink/2023/09/30/the-nebulous-plume-a-ferris-wheel-press-and-esterbrook-collaboration/If I'm using them with a dip pen, I always decant them into dinky dips, to avoid mishaps, and also to make it easier to stir the ink while I'm using it (the shimmer falls to the bottom of the jar really fast). Of course, then I don't get to interact with the beautiful bottles while I work.
Regarding your question about the consistency of Rohrer & Klingner inks - like most other brands, it really depends on the color. I find the Helianthus to work well straight out of the bottle (the stable, wide-mouthed bottle) without any doctoring, as long as the nib is really clean and I'm using high-quality paper. Solferino (a vivid fuchsia with green-bronze sheen) is a little less predictable. Sepia bleeds a lot, so I use it mostly for painting.
Ferris Wheel inks can be variable in behavior depending on the color too - the Winterberry was a little bit disappointing that way; the Atlas Iron Ore is better behaved straight from the bottle. Both of them are better in a Parallel pen than with a dip pen. I blew through a whole bottle of Winterberry with a 6mm Parallel over the course of an intensive holiday card season - it was beautiful, but the bottle annoyed me so much. So I've moved on to other dark-red & gold inks that are in bottles that are easier to use.
With any new ink, I always make a swatch card to test the chromotography, the behavior with broad edge and pointed pen, and the reaction to bleach. The "Inkvent" threads have examples, if you're curious:
https://theflourishforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=7549.0Sorry for the extensive ink rant. I have feelings about ink. For me the sweet spot for style, quality, variety, and novelty right now is with Dominant Industries, Wearingeul (both from South Korea), and also Birmingham Pen Co. (from Pittsburgh, USA).
Here is my Beast! And only 4 more days to go!
