Playing With Ink

When I was about eight years old, my grandmother gave me a Parker 45 fountain pen and ink cartridges. I still have it and it still works, though it had to be repaired once. Since then, I have accumulated other fountain pens: some that can take cartridges of ink, and some that must be filled from bottles. So today I’m going to talk about the fun of playing with ink colors.

Ink cartridges usually come in a limited range of colors. Parker offers black, blue, red, and green. I think they once offered turquoise, but I may be misremembering. Pilot offers cartridges in black, blue-black, blue, green, red, purple, and sepia (brown), which is quite a variety.

The fun comes when you change from one color of ink cartridge to another without rinsing your pen. Your words slowly change in color as the old ink gets flushed out of the nib. (Sorry, no photo.) This is playing with ink without any mess and fun for kids. (Just remember to show them how to write with a fountain pen—gently, and holding the pen at an angle, not upright. Nib right side up, and both sides of the split in contact with the paper--don't write with the side of the nib.)

Bottled ink currently comes in an enormous variety of colors. I think most pen companies offer their own selection. Noodler’s Ink even offers an invisible ink that shows up under UV light. As far as I know, there is no need to match the brand of pen to the brand of bottled ink.

Ink bottles come in varied shapes as well as colors.

You can't quite see it, but I tested the UV ink, too.

Here it is, with a black light shining on it.

Most of the cartridge pens can take a converter that allows them to use bottled ink. However, since you dip the pen into the bottle when refilling it, you shouldn’t go straight from one color to different one without rinsing out the pen. There’s way too much ink residue still in the pen, even if the pen has run completely dry. You don’t want to contaminate one color of ink with another. So you can’t do the same trick with bottled ink that you can with cartridges.

However, I just realized recently that writing with various dilutions of ink is also fun! I don’t know why it took me so long to try it. I started writing with a pen that had held violet ink and which I was trying to rinse clean. I had filled it for the umpteenth time with distilled water and it was still writing violet—but pale violet. (I think I needed to take the converter out and rinse the nib thoroughly.)

Testing various inks and pens.

Inks can do strange things when diluted, especially black ink. Probably you’ve seen the result of black marker on paper towel getting wet and spreading out in different colors that you didn’t realize were in there. For this post, I took two pens that I thought had been filled with black ink and refilled them with distilled water. Strangely, one started producing yellowish writing for a while, then darkened to a dilute black. The other behaved oddly (I should have taken a photo of the paper towel I was wiping it on), then settled down to a bluish black. Turns out I don’t even have a bottle of black ink. I must have filled one with Ebony-brown and the other with Blue-black.

I should also add that ink that has been diluted with water isn’t going to behave quite the same way as undiluted ink. I don’t know what other ingredients go into ink, but I am aware that there is more than just water in there. Probably there are ingredients that thicken it slightly, or help it flow or help it dry quickly… I don’t know.

Some people take playing with ink to higher levels. Some people mix ink colors and then fill their pens with them.  Other people refill cartridges from a bottle using a syringe. 

Maybe someday I will be one of those people. For now, I’m having enough fun swapping out cartridges to watch the color change, and writing with diluted ink en route to switching colors of bottled ink.

Till next post.