Feathering Test of 3 Brown Inks

Hi All,

I’ve been assembling my arsenal of inks that show little to no feathering on office-quality paper, and in this pursuit, I got to experimenting with brown colors that I had available at the time.

The three inks that I tried were the following:

• Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Brown – Pelikan M200 Italic pen
• J. Herbin Terre de Feu – Noodlers Konrad & Monteverde 1.1 nib
• Sheaffer Skrip Brown – Noodler’s Konrad & Monteverde 1.1 nib

All three pens have more or less the same flow (two of them being identical)

I did my tests on two types of paper. One was the OfficeMax writing pad and the other was plain old copy paper.

Here are the results of my testing on OfficeMax Writing pad:

All 3 inks on OfficeMax Writing Pad

Now for some close-ups of each individual ink.

Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Brown

J. Herbin Terre de Feu

Sheaffer Skrip Brown

The reverse of the same page shows varying degrees of bleedthrough on each ink.

Bleed-through; Top to bottom: Pelikan, J.Herbin, Sheaffer

And now my findings on regular copy paper:

All 3 inks on copy paper

And each individual ink in extreme closeup:

J. Herbin Terre de Feu

Pelikan 4001 Brilliant Brown

Sheaffer Skrip Brown

Conclusions:

All three colors are very beautiful sober chocolate brown colors. In order of preference, I like Pelikan the best, followed very closely by Sheaffer which has a slightly more reddish hue (ever so slightly). And the newest ink that I have discovered, and now like a lot, is J. Herbin, which is the darkest brown out of all three.

On these highly absorbent papers none of the inks showed any particular shading, but there was a slight amount of shading with the Pelikan Brown. I’m not a shading fanatic and in certain circumstances I feel it could be a bit distracting (especially in a work-like setting)

The feathering that was observed on all three inks was as follows. J.Herbin and Pelikan showed roughly the same degree of feathering and bleed through and the Sheaffer was the worst performer in this regard with a high level of feathering and bleed through.

As shown in the pictures above, I had used stub or italic nibs for my tests and the feathering spread from sheaffer was so bad that I could no longer see any line variation on the page. When the ink spreads so readily on the page that any information about the shape of the nib is lost, then I consider it an inappropriate ink for the job.

I have an entire bottle of Pelikan Brown and it seemed to have performed admirably under these adverse conditions. I’m on the fence about buying a bottle of J. Herbin (I had an old Goulet Ink vial of the stuff so I thought I use that for my tests). And the Sheaffer Brown, although a very pretty color, will enjoy its presence Rhodia-land and Clairefontaine-ville, never to venture out into murkier conditions of the copy-paper.

I hope you enjoyed these tests. I’m interested to hear what you think about them. What would be useful what could be changed. I’m a fairly new to blogging so I’m open to any and all suggestions that would make my blog more useful.

Thanks for reading.