Vinta, dip pen, MiquelRius/Canson

Welcome to the new platform! Hope it wasn’t too bumpy to get here.

So last week I got a birthday gift card and ordered some ink — two J. Herbins that I’ll tackle later and this, a Vinta. I’m getting to a point where I need to be careful about repetition and I didn’t have any Vinta ink in my collection so it was kind of a slam dunk, choice-wise.

I loved the combination that Goldspot described, and I loved it when I saw it in person. It’s much more bronze than brown. The usual lighting above does not really do it justice, so here it is close up and in natural lighting. (Yes, I would like to make these smaller photos, but I don’t know how to do that here yet.)

So…why the howevers? Classic error on my part: I didn’t look at /r/fountainpens before I ordered. There’s a lot of complaining about several things with Vinta: the mica powder coming off after the ink dries, it’s a pain to clean out of a pen, and the bottle evaporates much too rapidly.

When I did this Miquelrius swatch, I’d already tested on Canson multimedia paper. I’d expected to be able to smear the words “however” on the Miquelrius pretty heavily, especially after it dried. Except…nope. Just went back over it now with my finger on the Miquelrius, aggressively, and…nope. It’s fine. Nothing like what’d happened on the Canson, which I didn’t take a picture of. So I tested the Canson paper just now and…yeah, still a bit. Not like the other day, though.

I’d been disappointed enough by the multimedia paper smear that I decided I’d probably end up using the ink more in art practice than daily writing. And it was fun that way — how frequently I dipped my pen produced different results.

I like the ink enough, and have enough (probably false) hope from the Miquelrius swatch that I will eventually give it a go on something like Tomoe River…and I MIGHT even try loading it into a low-stakes pen, like a Pilot Parallel or a Jinhao shark. If/when I do, I’ll report back.

As for evaporation? There’s a stopper built into the bottle and the problem’s been around long enough that theoretically, the stopper might be an attempt to address that. Though likely not — there are plenty of well-regarded inks that don’t have that problem and their bottles don’t have built-in stopper. Anyway, I just took a picture of the bottle level and if it dips unexpectedly, I get to try out putting distilled water in it to see what happens.

Next up is probably lots of J. Herbin action, especially now that my subcollection is up to date. And also an unexpected Christmas gift of Sailor blue-black that has replaced Parker Quink in my LAMY 2000 double broad, because it’s just that awesome.

Write soon, E