Ink Dips is meant to be a more casual, laid-back ink evaluation than is normal here at Fountain Pen Follies. Instead of carefully evaluating an ink I’m interested in, the point of Ink Dips is to blindly pick an ink sample from a box of the unwanted. Then I fill that sample in one pen and see what I think. It’s an inky experiment that’s a bit dippy. However, this one started out more fearsome than fun, since I was trying a type of ink I find a little scary.
De Atramentis Document Red. This perfectly waterproof red ink gets top marks for behavior in a pen, though cleaning was a little bit of an adventure. And it’s nicely permanent. But for me the ink’s color lacked vibrance and appeal.
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Very thorough, informative and entertaining. It’s good to know the pros and cons of this ink. The sports car red sample looked nice. But the clean-up does sound “a little bit of an adventure” as you so beautifully put it:)
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Early on in my FP ink obsession, I was looking for a vibrant red that was permanent and good on crappy paper for engineering print mark-ups. I grabbed a sample of this ink thinking: I need it for documents, so this should work.
I dropped it into my TWSBI, and boy was that a mistake. Not because it did anything to the pen, but because of the opaqueness of the ink itself! It was rather unsettling. Every time I looked at it, I had to remind myself that it wasn’t a solid mass in there.
Like you, I was completely underwhelmed by the color. And like you, everything else about it was fine. What I find interesting is that it was still the sad, pale red on our crappy white copy paper. What are the details of your crappy paper? For comparison, I’ll take a gander at what we carry at work. It would be interesting to see if there is a difference with crappy paper that seem the same on paper. (I suppose pun intended!)
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Oh my gosh, I sympathize so much with your TWSBI experience. This ink calls for an opaque pen. 🙂
Unfortunately, I don’t know what this particular copy/printer paper was! I tried this on a bunch of “bad papers” — newsprint even — and it only looked nice on that one paper. It behaved well on all of them.
Perhaps I’ll add some DA Document inks in blue to our pen station ink array, to see if those have decent color. Or, actually, maybe I can see about getting samples of a few Sailor Storia inks for the ink station instead. Leveraging for the greater good my dictatorial power over the ink station (devious chuckle here)….
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