I picked up a bottle of Platinum Carbon Black ink from a new vendor, Gumwater, more on them at the end of the review. When the ink arrived on my doorstep I immediately cleaned out my fine nibbed TWSBI 540 fountain pen and loaded it up. I found the ink to be black, very very black. It’s relatively well behaved on all my sketchbook papers with some minor soak and show through on my Field Notes, but that is to be expected with Field Notes. I didn’t notice feathering on any of paper that I’ve tested it on so far.

I did notice some lift when I was putting a watercolor wash over the top of it. I suspect this is because it hadn’t dried fully. What little did lift was a neutral gray color and thus didn’t turn the color of the watercolor off.

The ink lubricated the pen well. I never felt like I was writing on sandpaper but I didn’t feel like I was writing on glass either. That might change if I was loading it into a different pen.

If I were to rate the darkness of the black inks I have in my possession I’d rate them as follows:

1. Platinum Carbon Black
2. Noodler’s Black
3. Noodler’s Heart of Darkness
4. Pelikan Fount India
5. Chelpark Permanent Black
6. Pelikan Black in International Long Cartridges

Platinum Carbon Black is a carbon basesd ink, which means it's pigmented with microscopic particle of carbon, which gives it the deep black color. Pigmented inks are a little more high maintenance in fountain pens. If you put a pigmented ink in your pen you'll need to clean the pen a little more often and watch to be sure it's not getting mucked up. Honestly though, I've been using Pelikan's Fount India regularly for 6 months now and I can say I've noticed no long term ill effects from using a pigmented ink in my pens, and I don't clean my pens regularly, nor do I use them everyday. I take all dire fountain pen warnings with a grain of salt.

The price of Platinum Carbon is, well, not cheap. I pulled the trigger on it because Gumwater was having a sale on it in their “Daily Drop.” Their daily drop puts one item in their inventory on deep discount for a day. The ink itself was $16.50 for 60ml, minus my Fountain Pen Network discount of 5% for a total of $15.68. Which if you look at a few places on the ‘net you’ll find that is anywhere from 1/2 to 2/3 the regular price of Carbon Black. Shipping was reasonable as well $4.41 for priority mail shipping. So I got a very expensive ink for $20. If you order over $50 Gumwater does shipping for free. If I’d known I was going to like the ink as much as I do I’d have ordered 3 bottles to get it over the $50 mark.

The ink was packaged very well. The small ink bottle was nestled in it’s own box and swaddled in bubble wrap then put inside a small sturdy box. The box arrived in good shape and quickly. I ordered on June 6th and received it on June 11th.* It was fast shipping. Overall I was pretty happy with Gumwater’s service. Their prices are reasonable, they packaged the items well and they arrived to me fast. One thing that I didn’t like was that every interaction with them was peppered with bible quotes. I’m not against religion but I’m against it being shoved in my face at every turn. I find religion to be a very personal thing so to have it on an invoice and packing slip feels a little strange to me. I mean why risk offending a customer with a differing religion?

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This winter I decided to test the lightfastness of many of my inks and a few pencils. I thought I’d lost the test sheet but it turns out I had stuck it to a different window when I had checked it. The results are interesting.

Not lightfast, showing large color shifting or significant fading:

• Chelpark Turquoise
• Camlin Royal blue
• Pilot G2 blue
• Sharpie Ultra Fine Point Blue

Color shifting but line seems the same:

• Loew Cornell Fine Point Marker
• Sharpie Ultra Fine Point Black
• Flying Colors Focus 0.5mm
• Corner Office Black

No change:

• Pentel Hybrid Technica
• Pentel Pocket Brush Pen (pentel ink)
• Permapague black fine point
• Faber Castell Pitt Pen Sepia
• Staples Gel mini- black
• Sharpie China Marker
• Derwent Graphitone
• Derwent Pastel Pencil
• Pelikan Fount India

The handbook paper which is acid free and a bright white color is now slightly  yellowed.

I just got my hands on a Uni-ball Kuru Toga mechanical pencil from Jetpens, a great place to buy Japanese office supplies. This is a pencil that rotates its lead for you, so you don’t need to rotate the pencil to keep an even thickness. This is more of an issue, if like me, you write with your mechanical pencils at an angle. I will admit to being skeptical to the necessity of this mechanism, having tried it, I see a huge difference in the evenness of my writing.

It’s a sharp looking (see what I did there) pencil. The point area is shiny chrome with an inset o-ring in the same color as the colored part of the body. Moving up the grip area is matte aluminum with some wave like indents. I was skeptical that this would feel good, but I was proved wrong, after an hour of sketching and writing I found that the wave like grooves were quite comfortable. At the lower part of the grip is a window to an orange piece. I couldn’t figure out what this was until I started to USE the pencil, there is a little icon that every 20 strokes of the pencil circles through the window, showing you that the lead is in fact rotating. Pretty cool stuff. Without this I’d be hard pressed to even notice that the lead was moving.

The body of the pen is a shimmery pink. This pen is perfect for people who like shimmer mists spray ink, it looks like a solid version of glimmer mists. It shimmers in the light. You know how I feel about shimmery stuff… For a pencil I can allow it, I might even like it.

The clip is shiny silver and sturdy, it has held the pencil to my MTNKO and in my bag without issue. The “knock” or clicker thingie is plastic affixed to a tube of metal that when removed reveals a mini eraser. Uni’s mini erasers are actually quite effective at removing pencil lines, but since mini eraser is mini, it gets used up fast. I always keep a click eraser nearby when using mechanical pencils. The click or knock itself is a satisfying clicky noise that pushes out roughly .5mm with a click.

I really like this pencil, I really like how my writing stays even when using it. It’s not the best for sketching that utilizes a lot of subtle shading as shading and a soft touch defeat the rotation mechanism. To rotate the pencil needs to be lifted from the page, the pressure of your writing or sketching is what causes the rotation. If you write in cursive you are not going to activate the rotation. This pencil is great for printing and works best when doing so. However for my abysmal printing cursive (in which I connect a lot of my letters and print many too) it works great. It also works well for cross hatching and general sketching. Being able to defeat the rotation mechanism and shade softly is a nice touch while sketching.

Uni offers several different versions of this pencil at a variety of price points, you really need to click over to the Jetpens page and scroll to the diagram section where there are several cartoons of frustrated students using other pencils that don’t rotate. Worth the laugh. For those of you who like flowers they offer this pencil with flowers on a shimmery barrel. You can thank me later.

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Basics:

• 9×12 inches, 60 Warm White sheets to a Coil bound pad
• $8.99 at AC Moore
• 70ld/114gsm
• Perfed pages
• Acid free blah blah blah

It seems Canson has a “true to size” sheet thing on almost all of it’s pads now. So if it’s marked 9×12 inches on the cover the sheet you tear off is actually 9×12 inches. This is a really really great thing. I always have hated that many pads would lose a ½ to full inch to the perf. I really like that.

The paper responds well to ink, nibs are true to size and there is no spread or feathering nor soak through on these pages. The paper is not glassy smooth but has enough tooth to accept pencil and charcoal well. It accepted watercolor well, but did show some cockling that did not even out completely when dry. Though it did flatten quite a lot, so that it’s just slightly wavy.

I really enjoyed how this paper accepted ink and watercolor. The watercolors really look great on it’s warm white color and ink melds with the paper in such a way to just look like it’s been there awhile.

 
I’ve been testing several new pens on it and I really  like that the nibs stay true to size and don’t spread all over the place when testing them. Even when my Noodler’s flex pens were flexed to their widest and bleeding ink onto the pages, there was no soak through or bleed through. I can’t stress that enough. It was pretty amazing to find an easily available pad that accepts ink as well as this and for a relatively inexpensive price compared to other fountain pen friendly paper.

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Basics at a glance:

• 9×12 inches
• 24 ivory colored sheets to a coil boundpad
• $7.50 at AC Moore
• 90lb/147gsm
• Acid free blah blah blah

The paper is a warm ivory color and the texture is smooth to the touch with a little visual texture. Pens offer some feedback on the surface and work well. Most ink does not soak through and most lines do not spread, staying true to the nib width. The paper is stiff and heavy, and at 90lb/ 147gsm it is a stiff paper.Light and medium heavy watercolor washes did well without soaking through the page. The paper did cockle while wet.

The paper would make a great art journal due to the lack of show through. Another thing I really like is that the sheets are truly 9×12 inches as the perf is at the 12 inch mark unlike other pads which have the perf at 11.5 inches with the last half inch including the coil binding. Some of the inks I tested on the pad feathered, but most did well. Watercolor performed well and looked good on the page. I’m going to have to test this pad out a little more before I decide if it’s a buy or not. At $7.50 for 24 sheets it’s a tad on the pricey side for general sketch paper and I’m not sure it’s a splurge or not.

Next week I'll review another Canson pad, the XL Recycled drawing pad.

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I picked up a single 3.5×5.5 inch notebook at Staples for $3.99, which seems pretty pricey for 38 pages, but that’s not pages but sheets, so you can double that, to 76 pages. Still a little pricey. All of the pages are perforated.

The cover has a plastic-y surface that is embossed with a very simple fabric like texture. It’s subtle. Inside the same fabric like theme is carried to the end sheets, where a woven like print is done in 2 colors, in all the notebooks I looked at the colors coordinated with the cover. Since I purchased a black notebook mine has black and gray printing. The end sheet has a “This notebook Belongs to:” section. then the following page has a more detailed version of the same info. I think they should stick to one or the other, having both seems like overkill. After that are a couple of lists of holidays as far out as 2014. Seriously, in a 76 page notebook? Is anyone actually going to plan 2 years in advance in a 76 page pocket sized notebook? Maybe in some of the larger notebooks I’d buy that but not in the pocket sized notebook.

These remind me of the old Moleskine Volants but with a sturdier cover. I’ve used Volants for years as a GTD tool for my DayJob. I picked this up as a GTD tool for Put it on Paper.

Inside the pages are cream/ivory colored, ever slightly so and my black notebook has blue dotted lines. I rather like that the the lines are not solid, it makes them subtle. I tested the notebook with my TWSBI 540 with heart of darkness ink. Granted my TWSBI writes wet but it soaked through on every page no matter how fast I wrote. Testing with some finer pens eliminated the soaking through but not the show through. The paper is thin. it reminds me a lot of Moleskine paper, but it behaves with ink better. With my finer nibs I didn’t notice any feathering or spread. In fact finer nibs performed really well. The paper is nice and smooth, all my nibs felt pretty good on it. It’s not as smooth as Rhodia or Clairefontaine paper but reminds me of the paper in a Moleskine Cahier.

I did a test run on the paper with a gel pen and it, as expected, performed flawlessly. I really expect that these were designed to perform perfectly with gel pens or ball points. It might even work well with a liquid ink pen in a fine point, like a Pilot V5 or the like.


I wish these came unlined. I like the fact they come in singles so I can mix and match colors. The line has a range of nice colors and patterns that don’t really strike my fancy. I prefer the big bright colors of the Moleskine range versus the subdued colors of Martha. If these were unlined I could see myself picking them up one at a time as I ran out. Staples offers a lot of coupons so these could end up being less expensive than the $3.99.

There are 2 things here that are deal killers for this notebook for me. First is the perforated pages. I can’t have all the pages in my notebook perforated. When a notebook like this lives in my back pocket, my bag, my jacket pocket, and on my desk it gets beaten up and perforated pages fall out. I’ve got a few moleskine cahiers and Volants where I’ve taped pages in with some washi tape. While I enjoy the washi tape I don’t want to have to resort to using up a roll to hold in all my pages. The final deal killer is that they only come lined. I like blank pages.

One of the other things I noticed which is  not a beef with the notebook but with the display at Staples, I can see these notebooks getting REALLY beat up fast. I noticed several notebooks with curled covers and one with a cut on the back of it and a few with dog eared pages. I appreciate the ecologically minded packaging, but perhaps the band should go the WHOLE way around the notebook instead of just around the cover? Anyway, keep an eye on Staples clearance section  a few beaten up pieces are sure to land there.

It has a chrome cap with a standard brass colored clip. The clip is springy and feels quite sturdy. It clips to the pen loop of my journal securely. I have managed to dent the cap already by letting it bang around in my bag.  The cap is relatively lightweight and for once I don’t mind it being posted. I don’t normally posts my caps so you may feel differently. The cap screws on securely with 2 full rotations. I polished my cap with a very mild polish and rubbed the brass right off the clip. I actually prefer this as I feel the clip now matches the cap.

The plastic of the pen does not have a high gloss but has a satin finish. The piston knob blends quite smoothly with the body of the pen. The piston was quite stiff at first but I found quickly loosened up after moving it a few times. It holds 1 ml of ink. There are is a large ink window around the pen just above the section. Where the ink window attached to the body of the pen is a sharp step up. I may sand this down to make the pen more comfortable but I don’t find that it rests on my finger uncomfortably as of yet.

The nib of this pen is the smallest nib I’ve ever seen on a fountain pen. It reminds me of a crow quill pen that we used to use in high school art class. It’s mini. It  was scratchy at first but I looked at it under magnification (iPod touch w/ macro lens) and aligned the tined and then gave it a quick smooth on a nail buffing stick. Perfection. It writes with good flow and is nice and smooth. I was surprised that it was so smooth with so little work. The nib is what I would call a fine. It’s not what I would call a wet writer but it’s not dry either. I also have it inked with Noodler’s Black which tends to have great flow.

The pen is very slim, about BIC stick size, so for me it’s not the most comfortable pen to hold and use. But I have found myself reaching for it continually since it arrived.

I think it is a great pen for sketching or writing.

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