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Scribal Work Shop Bunny Washable Damselfish Blue

5/17/14
I'll tell y'all at the top of the page: I'm just not a fan of this ink. That name...it's way too long. There are just way too many words in there.

The Scribal Work Shop is a really interesting company. They appear to be focused on historical inks and scribe-ery. That's neat. I'm a fan of small ink-makers, and I want them to do well. I really wish I liked their inks.

Damselfish is a darkish blue ink with brighter-blue highlights. The swatch below is pretty great, and it shows all of the hues in this ink. If I could ever have gotten it to look like this from a pen, I would love it.


The problem, for me, with this ink is that it dries way too fast and tends to clog up the nib and give me hard starts. It skips and is generally unpleasant. I wanted to give it every chance to shine, so I put it through two of my reliable Kaweco nibs. The first squiggle below is a broad nib, and that broad is usually really wet. You can see, where it started, that there was a skip, and there was a bit of hesitation before it even skipped. It felt dry in the broad nib, and that's a first. The second squiggle is from a medium nib which has a really even and predictable flow. Damselfish was balky and felt rough even after I got it started on another bit of paper. You can see a few inconsistent bits and how it almost skipped on the last flourish. Once you get the ink flowing, it's fairly okay. Don't stop writing, though, or you'll get a hard start almost immediately.








My only idea for making this ink work well is to use it with a dip pen. I don't have any of those, but give it a try if you do. The smear looks great, and I have to think there's a way to use this ink.

If you wan to try this ink out, then go get some from AndersonPens. They have 1oz bottles and 3ml samples.

Here's the water test video. It came out a little weird. The iMovie version was sideways (and I don't know why) and when I corrected it in YouTube it made it all small. Weird. Even the video for this ink didn't work out for me. :-/




Here's the unsurprising result from a washable ink.


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