The Wet Pen Inks - Elliott Bay and Deception Pass
New inks day! I ordered 2 inks from a fountain pen YouTuber, Matthew Gore, creator of The Wet Pen. A few weeks ago he announced the availability of these inks that he produced himself as a way to support his channel. I thought this was a cool idea, so I picked up the 2 chromoshading inks from his 3-ink collection — Elliott Bay and Deception Pass.
This is what the ink bottle and packaging look like. Very nice! I really like the silver foil against the dark blue label. The bottle is sturdy glass and holds lots of ink (50 mL). The wide mouth is easy to fill from.
These swatches are on original Tomoe River paper. Both inks have blue base colors, but both have an underlying green tone, which shows up more in Deception Pass than Elliott Bay.
Elliott Bay goes on as a medium purple-y blue to my eye before it dries a little lighter and the green tones creep in. Deception Pass goes on first as a cloudy blue-gray, but gets progressively greener as it dries. The amount of green showing through depends on the nib, which you’ll see in the writing samples below.
I have a scan with all the writing samples (on a sheet of Kokuyo Business Paper) together for easy comparison, but I break them apart further below.
I picked my 2 Preppies since I wanted identical nibs to see the differences between the inks. They definitely look different from a pen vs. the swatches above. I was surprised at how dry the nibs felt, considering how wet the ink behaved during swatching. I guess the Preppy nibs are quite fine and are reining in the ink flow.
In this writing sample, I dipped a JoWo medium nib and a Kaweco broad nib. Both are firehoses with these inks! The green doesn’t show up much here, and the blue looks more blue-gray than a purplish-blue. Perhaps the green tones are canceling the purple, resulting in the blue-gray? 🤔
I cleaned off the same pens as above and dipped into the Deception Pass ink. The green tones end up overtaking the blue, making the ink overall more green-gray to me, sort of like Herbin Vert de Gris.
Because these inks are on the wetter side, I’d recommend pairing them with your drier writing pens, unless you like this firehose performance. As a person whose writing is small, I prefer how the inks perform in the Preppies, though I’d have them feel just the tiniest bit wetter for smoother writing, not a big deal.
What do you think of these colors? In the announcement video, you can see that the 3rd ink, is more of a regular medium blue with a pink/red sheen. Since I have other inks similar to that, I thought I’d focus on these other 2. As you may know, I love dusky ink colors, and these two deliver. I’m interested to see if The Wet Pen ink collection grows beyond these initial inks. They’re off to a good start.
