Newest Acquisitions (Virtual "Show & Tell") ~ part 466

I was so happy when Lawrence sent in another installment of his thoughts on his favourite fountain-pen-and-ink matchups (or what he calls "Lavalife and pens"; ). This review (Part 4) continues on after part 1, part 2 and part 3...

Lawrence's review:

This is a fairly small group which only includes a handful of pens. This group I call "Purple Pleasures" (for reasons you'll see later on LOL). This ink/pen group is basically an "offshoot" of the Syrah group (i.e., the "grail group"), and was an "unintended byproduct" of my search for the perfect colour for my grail pens. This group was based on Montblanc's Lavender purple:

(all photos courtesy of Lawrence ~ please click on images to enlarge)

It's a very nice ink actually. And it goes on brilliant purple and dries nicely without losing too much of the colour (some inks tend to become "desaturated" as they dry). I got this ink while I waited for the Syrah. I got it knowing that this is definitely not burgundy, but just want to try to see how it looks (a part of me almost felt like I was having an "affair" of sorts, because I deviated from the original goal / "the one true path"..blah blah blah...basically I know I have "sinned" so there... LOL).

Most of my grail pens are black so they match well with it. But instead of the gothic vampire vibe, this gives me more of a "happy" Sesame Street's The Count vibe. Still good, but not too satisfying for me.

Because of my "hoarding" tendencies LOL, I, of course, have more than one purple/violet ink. The other one I got was J. Herbin's Poussiere de Lune. Most J. Herbin inks have this "faded" look, but this one is actually quite "saturated" (relatively speaking). I admit, I got this ink because of the name LOL (I know it's a silly reason to get an ink but whatever):

Although purples / violets look okay with most of my black pens, I have never really warmed up to them. It's like when stories portray people having affairs, it's usually like a side thing LOL. Anyway joking aside, although these colours are pretty good, they are sort of not quite the "nostalgia blue" nor are they the "grail/Syrah burgundy" group, so they are kind of stuck in the middle, and almost ignored. Until fate intervened....

On a shopping spree at Nikaido, I obtained an unusually coloured pen (at least for me it is). This is the Faber Castell Neo-slim olive green, which I lovingly named my "Tiki pen" (I have reviewed this pen before):

Because I have never had a pen of this colour before, I also decided to look for an ink to match it. Maja helped me find a good match using the colour wheel and I ended up with Kyo no oto sakuranezumi:

This ink was a great match for the Neo-slim. This ink has a similar consistency to my J. Herbin inks, and actually also has this "faded" look. Funnily enough, compared to Poussiere de Lune, it's even more faded. However after a few weeks of using this ink, I found that the Neo-slim, due to its unusual nib design, did not quite love this ink. It writes rather dry and suffers from "hard starts". It's quite a shame. However this incident renewed my interest in purple / violet inks again. Anyway, I discovered a few of my pens (in addition to the Neo-slim) that will occasionally work with this particular colour group from time to time.

My Waterman Elegance is one of these pens. I sort of got the idea from an online review of this pen using purple ink, so I tried it out and it's okay. However I do have another ink group that this pen is more suitable for (which I will talk about in future installments):

Another pen that I tried with this group is the Kaweco sport brass. I don't really feel anything for this particular colour match, but this pen happens to be a 1.3 stub and it shows off a really cool shading effect from the purple inks. The Montblanc Lavender Purple, in particular, looks great with this larger nib size:

My demonstrators of course will take whatever ink. The one the I have using purple is my TWSBI 580:

The only grail pen I have that ended up regularly sampling the purple is my Visconti Homo Sapiens 1.3 stub. Again, this also because of the stub nib and the way the purple inks look with thicker lines:

As for my Neo-slim, my match-making attempts did not pan out very well. It ended up leaving this group due to the problems it had with the nib drying up. However, there is a nice closure to this saga....as of this writing the Neo-slim is happily on a heavenly escapade with an Italian black ink named Leonardo (courtesy of Maja) LOL.

That's it for this group. 

Wow! Our thanks to Lawrence for another fun and informative review (and all the photos that accompanied it). Thank you for the kind words, Lawrence; I can't wait for the next installment :)