Newest Acquisitions (Virtual "Show & Tell") ~ part 438

 And now for something completely different.... (and wonderful :)

My fellow pen club member Lawrence is obsessed with a big fan of matching fountain pens with certain inks - in fact, he labels his pen-and-ink-matching "OCD". A while back, he mentioned to me that he was thinking of doing a series of blog posts about the inks he likes to use in certain fountain pens. I expressed a lot of interest in this, so he asked if I thought it might be of interest to other readers of this blog. I replied with an enthusiastic "Yes!", so a few weeks later, he sent me the following text and photos. I hope you enjoy reading about the inks Lawrence uses in his fountain pens as much as I did :)

(all text & photos by Lawrence ~ please click on images to enlarge)

"Okay, so this is not a review, but it may fall into the category of "crazy show and tell".  I'm not sure if I'm the only person that "practices" this pen-ink-matching quirk.  I will be curious to see if other people in the club do it, and what kind of matches they come up with.  I tend to organize my inks into colour groups and that will be the format in which I will present this multipart post.

The first group is what I called my "childhood nostalgia" inks.  These are inks that I used in school or have colours similar to this.  The "cult-leader" of this group is my faithful Parker washable blue:

 

And the inks in this group are sort of variants of this color:

It's the most basic of basics.  No nonsense type of ink.  And this is sort of in my mind what I think of the color "blue" in general. 

There are variations of this group that I sort of lump together. One of them is the indigo-ish variant that S.T. Dupont has:

Compared to the Parker, this is a bit more "violet" (???).   And the other extreme is the blue-black variant; Parker Blue-Black (which is not featured here) is one example. 

The one I do have featured though, is the Caran D'ache ink:

 

So, this entire group contains ink colours that I used in school (these are also the main group that the school will allow and "blue-black" is already pushing it for those students who want to be "edgy" LOL).  And, of course, the main pens that I use with them are my "nostalgic childhood" ones:

Yes, they are all Parkers. Starting with the Parker 95 from the left, the two 45s in the middle, and my most precious possession: the Parker 21 (my "default school pen"). I can review some of them in the future perhaps. I match them with this nostalgia blue because they are indeed from my childhood and maybe psychologically I am already hard programmed that they will only use the nostalgia blue. Sometimes I will try black ink in them, but rarely. I feel "safer and comforted" when they write in blue LOL.

I do have some modern pens that I write with using this ink group:

 
The Faber Castell Basic (left), a Monteverde Artista, and a MB "tribute" pen.  The Monteverde, because it's a demonstrator, can get away with a lot more colors than the other two.  So, in the other pen-ink installments, the demonstrator pens may appear again.  

Both these groups of pens are predominantly silver / chrome pens (that Parker 21 however is mainly blue-green, but it also happens to rule my world so it gets away with it LOL), so matching them with this blue shade works well.  I do try other colors with these pens, but I always come back to this combo. 

There is another blue group that I will probably work on next, as it's related to this post."

Lawrence - thank you so much for this :)  I'm really looking forward to another installment of your pen & ink matching series, sometime down the road!