November 9, 2016
Platinum Carbon Ink Fountain Pen
When drawing fine detail in my Dala Art, I’ve had to resort to using a micron pen to guarantee that it won’t bleed at all. If I have decided to add the veins in leaves or the tiny gears in a mechanism, I don’t want the small areas that need to be left white or a light value to bleed into black defeating the strength of value contrast.
To escape the crush of people stunned into paralysis by the blaze of color at the Columbia Road Flower Market in London, I slipped between the flower pots and found myself standing in front of a stationery store, Choosing Keeping.
My feet refused to move in any other direction other than into the tiny shop where I discovered two unique fountain pens, the Platinum Carbon Ink Fountain Pen and Sailor Fude DE Mannen Fountain Pen. I’ll discuss the Sailor pen in another post.
A beautiful door adjacent to the stationery shop
In spite of its small size, the shop displayed a number of unusual stationery items including a few fountain pens I’d not seen before. My curiosity got the better of me again and I wanted to know more about the long, black pen labeled as a carbon ink fountain pen.
Noodle’s Black is my standard ink in my fountain pens. It doesn’t clog my pens and it is relatively, perhaps more than relatively, permanent. I usually enjoy the variety of edges when it does bleed … but not all the time. I don’t like when it obliterates detail I have taken care to include in my drawing nor do I like when it transforms a small figure into a blob or a gentle face into a dark and angry one.
Carbon ink dries quickly into a permanent, unbleeding line. It is a pigmented rather than a dye-based. The pigment particles can cause trouble in a regular fountain pen, rendering it useless and difficult to clean. I don’t know why the Platinum Carbon Ink Fountain Pen can handle this ink, but it does. (One of these days I’ll spend some time finding out what is different about this nib.)
Within seconds of finishing the little sketch of thyme leaves (upper right) I brushed a watery yellow glaze of watercolor over the entire sketch without any bleed at all! Carbon ink will not replace my Noodler’s Black as my favorite ink to draw with but it adds another fabulous tool to my studio and travel tools.
The Platinum Carbon Ink Fountain Pen uses both cartridge and converter. The carbon ink is also available in both cartridge and bottle.