I’ve been journaling for years and have pretty much always used my favorite pen. That would be the Uni Signo UM-151 (DX). I used to be able to get a set of colors that included blue-black, green-black, brown-black, bordeaux-black and purple-black. That was great, except that I couldn’t get refills in those colors. The refills only came in blue, black and red. I liked having a bit of color. So after some years of using these pens (which I still use at work and in other places), I’ve started using a fountain pen. I bought a Twisbi ECO. It took me a while to get used to it, but it’s grown on me. The drawback is I don’t have the variety of colors. I have Robert Oster Direct Sun ink in my pen and I like it, but I miss changing colors each day. Last week, I decided to buy another fountain pen (another Twisbi ECO). I spent a bit of time thinking about colors and decided that I wanted a nice brown. I thought that might be a nice contrast with the red I had been using. I bought DeAtramentis Document Ink - Brown. I may have fallen for marketing, but I thought that this would be good for writing in a journal. The journal I use is a Leuchtturm 1917 Hardcover. I got the pen and ink today. I loaded it up and tried it out. The results in my journal were really bad, see the picture.

fountain pen ink test

I’m still somewhat new to fountain pens, so I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or this ink just has a lousy quality to it. I took out the brown ink and put in Waterman Serenity Blue, which I already had. That ink wrote just fine in my journal. Both inks wrote fine in the Expedient Notebook I had. I don’t quite understand why. I thought the paper in the Leuchtturm 1917 notebook was good for fountain pens and felt pretty close to the paper in the Expedient Notebook. So why one ink behaved so differently is a mystery to me. I guess I should avoid the DeAtramentis ink. But I’d also like to figure out what about that ink causes it to behave so weirdly. It would be good to avoid whatever that is in the future.