Randomizing Pen And Ink Choices

What happens when you let other people pick out your next fountain pen and ink combination? Magic.

That’s what took place last week in Thursday’s Twitch stream, and the experience was so enjoyable I thought I would take the time to write up how complete randomness turned in to something awesome.

One of the interactive parts of Twitch is a tool called Channel Points. Viewers watch the stream, and passively build up a bank of points. As a streamer, I can then create Point Redemptions for the viewers to make me do different tasks. For a few points, you can make me hydrate, or check my posture - which are things often missed while streaming. For more points, you can get me to run a stationery giveaway on stream, or, as in this case, ink up a fountain pen. That’s where the fun came in!

This point redemption allows the user to pick any fountain pen I own and make me ink it up with any ink I own. When this redemption happens, it turns into interactive awesomeness between myself and the stream, with discussions around what they should make me do.

In this particular case, the point redeemer, let’s call them Alan, leaned into the randomness by not having any pre-planned ideas for the pen and ink choice. So, what did we do? We rolled the dice.

I had recently received several random dice to use for my solo journaling games (more on that another day,) so we put them into action. My Toyooka Craft 100 pen box is the perfect partner for dice rolls with 5 trays of 20 pens each, so we grabbed the two dice needed for a D100 roll and fired them across the desk.

The result? 69. You cannot make this up. Nice!

That put us into the 9th slot of the fourth tray, which held the elusive Franklin-Christoph Model 20 Italian Ice. This is a pen that was on my shopping list for years before I was able to acquire it, and it will be around for years more. That said, it hasn’t been inked up for a while, so this was a wonderful choice.

While picking the pen was rather straightforward, my ink is not in a well-organized situation that would make it easy to match up with dice. We decided to roll a d20 and a d6 to pick a letter of the alphabet that we could match with an ink brand or color name. We hit 8 on the roll, meaning we had to come up with something related to “H”. It took a second, and then “Herbin” was shouted. Jacques Herbin! I have plenty of those, especially of the shimmer variety. My favorite of those, Shogun, was mentioned, and Alan decided that yes, that needs to be inked in the Italian Ice.

These results made me want to write this post. I love my Franklin-Christoph Italian Ice. I also love J. Herbin Shogun. Not in a million years would I sit here and put those two together, and to someone who often gets stuck in safe pen and ink pairing ruts, this is a goldmine of fun. I want more of it.

Maybe one of these days, I’ll go full Omakase at a pen show and see what kind of trouble we can get in to.

---

Enjoy reading The Pen Addict? Then consider becoming a member to receive additional weekly content, giveaways, and discounts in The Pen Addict shop. Plus, you support me and the site directly, for which I am very grateful.

Membership starts at just $5/month, with a discounted annual option available. To find out more about membership click here and join us!

An Inky Survey - Please Fill Out!

Community member Dr. Nicole Sharp put together a survey to collect data around the perceptions of wetness and dryness as it relates to fountain pen inks. A note from Dr. Sharp in the Pen Addict Slack is below:

“As many of you know, I study the physics of fluids, and I've teamed up with a rheologist to look at the characteristics of different fountain pen inks. We'd like to correlate our scientific findings with how people perceive different inks, and, to that end, we've created this survey. We're asking you to rank the listed inks on a scale of 1 (extremely dry) to 10 (extremely wet) based on your own experience. If you've only used one of the inks, that's fine, just rank that one. Used a bunch of them? Awesome, rank them all!

The more FP users we can get info from, the better we can correlate our rheological results with the subjective ones, so please share the link and encourage your pen friends to participate.”

Please click here to go to the survey and add in any data you have. I look forward to the results!

Review: J. Herbin Lie de Thé Fountain Pen Ink

This review is by Kalina Wilson, who can also be found at geminica.com.

Not long ago I started exploring brown pen options in the post Brown Pen Battle. Now I add for consideration a fountain pen option:  J. Herbin's Lie de Thé (Tea Brown) ink.

J. Herbin offers some gorgeous, brilliant, and intriguing colors, and Lie de Thé is no exception.  I found it to be a very pleasing brown tone that seems to dance between all its constituent colors so that sometimes I see more green or yellow in it and sometimes red.  The above strokes were made with a brush;  I've also loaded the ink into my Pilot Penmanship and Hero M86 Chinese Calligraphy Pen, shown here with a couple of comparison colors.

 
Of course, the J. Herbin inks are not waterproof, and therefore are not going to be ideal for all uses. Still, oh man, what a lovely color.  

My only other brown-ish ink right now is Noodler's Antietam, which is actually more of a red than a brown. It's an extremely beautiful color that I've tried to use as if it were brown but the red can easily overwhelm a drawing or clash with watercolors that get added later. This J. Herbin brown, on the other hand, is beautifully balanced.  It works great as a brown that can play nice with most other colors, adding rather than competing.  It doesn't demand the spotlight but it's willing to step up when needed. 

Here you can see that the color works gorgeously both for line and with added water. There is no watercolor used in this drawing - just the Lie de Thé and a waterbrush, along with a gray brush pen for the distant buildings (see my next review, up soon.)  

There are so many beautiful colors of ink to use, but a well-balanced brown gets special points for versatility.  This ink is gorgeous on buff paper and white, with water and without, with added colors or on its own. If you're looking for a water soluble brown ink to sketch with, that will work for a lot of subjects and a variety of styles, the Lie de Thé will not disappoint.