30 Days, 30 Inks: Day 13
The Ink
Day 13: Sailor Shikiori Chushu
Chushu was one of the first 2 bottles of ink I bought when I started getting into fountain pens (the other was Diamine Red Dragon). I bought these to match the Platinum Preppy Wa pens I ordered. I had no experience at that point with either ink brand. I was just doing the “matchy matchy” thing I’d seen people on fountain pen forums doing. 🙂 Both inks ended up being pretty good matches for the pens.
I also really liked Chushu in watercoloring. I had played around with it on wetted down watercolor paper, and ended up using it for several Inktober sketches I did last year.
As you can see, when used on wet watercolor paper, the different shades of purple, gray, pink, and a bit of green come out. It’s great for spacey backgrounds. 🙂
Much later I realized that this is a perfect dusky-colored ink for my collection of those. It’s a wet ink, so it should work well in most nibs, but broader nibs will show off more of its “hidden” shades.
The Quote
“Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.”
- Jonah Lehrer
There’s not much I can say about this, other than that I agree. Sadly, as much as I believe that travel is great for expanding one’s horizons and feeding one’s creativity, I have done very little of it. More recently, that’s thanks to the pandemic, but even before then, I wasn’t the best at planning and taking trips. Hopefully in the near future that can be addressed.
Behind the Scenes
Along with a set of round calligraphy nibs, I also bought a folded nib pen. A while back, I’d seen someone use it for ink swatching and wondered what it was. Finally I was able to Google the right words and came across its proper name of a “folded nib”. I still have to practice with it to actually use it for lettering, but for simple ink swatching it seems to work well. My only complaint is that I wasn’t able to show a lighter application of the ink to give a hint to its different shades within, but the Inktober sketches above did that. In case you ever saw one of these pens and wasn’t sure what it was, now you know!
