For me, that was Noodler’s Black Swan in Australian Roses. It looked so cool and full of shading in the swatches I looked at - especially when it got dark, nearly black where it pooled.
Maybe I got another, worse batch of it or something, but for me it’s just a really uniform magenta, even on TR and wet pens. I don’t get what the hype is about, but maybe I was just unlucky.
Funnily, for me, skull and roses sheens red pretty heavily on nearly all papers. Maybe you got a bad batch, as well?
Midori MD pads with one of their covers work well and aren’t too expensive. Available in A5 and A6 if I recall. Otherwise as already mentioned I like the 90gsm Rhodia or Clairefontaine notebooks. The 80gsm Rhodia paper (found in a lot of their pads) always feels like the backside of the paper has less coating on it and not as enjoyable.
If it’s from St. Louis Art Supply, chances are that pen was tuned by their fountain pen specialist before it went to you. Regardless, I hope it gives you a ton of joy to write with.
Or people like me have Autism and ADHD, this lacking the fine motor control for handwriting.
My “handwriting” ended up with me being the only kid in school that was permitted to hand in all my written work by typing it up on computer and printing it out. In 1990.
I ended up on the opposite side of that. Writing was one of my obsessions growing up, so my cursive is very classic and neat. I need to get back into writing more than work notes, actually.
I haven’t done much of it. I have another Pilot Metropolitan with a medium nib which writes very smoothly. The stub nib isn’t as smooth, although my initial experiments have been on paper that’s not especially fountain pen friendly.
I also notice that I have to write more slowly with the stub nib or I get line widths that vary unexpectedly. Pilot calls it a calligraphy nib and I think it really is, rather than something you’d use for everyday notetaking. Perhaps those whose handwriting is more consistent have better results.
It’s too bad because I very much like how stub nibs let colored inks show. I’ve noticed that with narrow nibs, sometimes a colored ink doesn’t really “read” as colored when you look at it.
I find that they’re great for headings, titles, dates, etc - a little emphasis in my notes. With that said, my pilot metropolitan’s stub nib has also always been really scratchy too, and hard starts a lot. It’s always been one of my most disappointing pens.
One of my favorite stub nibs is a Jinhao 80 (Lamy 2000 clone, usually sub-$10). I swapped out the Jinhao nib for a Lamy 1.1 stub, and it writes like a dream!
My most recent ink purchase was Dominant Industry's Earl Grey Tea, and it's a beautiful orange shade that is well-behaved (albeit not quite as red as I was expecting when I ordered it). Absolutely no complaints - I even love the bottle, however I will probably get through it slowly because I don't often use colours that are bright and eye-catching.
By contrast, one of the inks that is in my permanent rotation and I plan to continue purchasing over and over is Diamine Saddle Brown. It's a more subtle, darker brown that can pass for 'serious' writing but still has a personality that I prefer over many other browns. If the orange of Earl Grey is a cozy Autumn fire, Saddle Brown is the tree branches holding on to their last leaves and the damp earth underfoot on a cold, foggy morning - both enticing in different ways.
Nice - I had misread this as Diamine Earl Grey at first, and was very confused (“I’ve used this before and don’t remember any orange tones!”). But it does look beautiful!
Saddle Brown also looks very nice and versatile. Do you think that you need a medium nib to get the full spectrum of shading? I’ve sometimes been disappointed with browns that are too light with an F nib (bought a sample of Robert Oster Caffe Crema, but it really was too light for my daily use unless in an M, B, or stub).
I do expect that you would need a medium or wider nib in order to get a real sense of shading out of the ink.
To your other concern, though, if anything I've found that Saddle Brown goes much darker when used in an F/EF nib. Certainly not to the point of being black, but dark enough that unless you were actually paying attention to the shade it doesn't immediately grab attention as being non-standard; to some people that defeats the point, but I find that sometimes (e.g. at work) I want to fly under the radar a bit while also knowing that I'm using 'my' colour.
It also looks amazing in notebooks that have a slightly ivory/off-white cast to the pages, where the overall sepia effect is something I really enjoy.
Unfortunately we’ve been in a heatwave and drought here, so the leaves are just changing from dead to more dead. However I think I may bring out Noodler’s Apache Sunset or Diamine Ancient Copper for my “walking around” pen.
@hsl I have lots of notes from my college & high school years, all scattered through various notebooks that I had to take from home when I left. So it's all a mess that I'm not that fond of. My country is also one where the educational system is pretty digitally backwards, so while on college students with laptops became quite ubiquitous over time (I started using a Lenovo Yoga 8 tablet, then a netbook, then the same tablet with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse) - even having a tablet in high school was short of a crime, unofficially.
I do indeed have notes scattered through apps, but I find it way easier exporting these and putting everything together, while I cannot easily do this with notebooks.
At my current job, I received a notebook though, and a 4-colors ballpoint pen. I started taking my training notes there, and I must say I find it easier to retain the info and memorize at least where can I find a specific information - something that I'm not sure I could've achieved with a digital note-taking app, no matter how good its indexing is. Also, if you want to schematize things, nothing beats pen and paper imo. Sure, you can buy an expensive tablet with a pen for the screen (an iPad, or a Galaxy Note). But you can get a pen for, what? Less than a dollar at a corner store? (with 2-3 RON I can buy a set of pens, and they hold me for years - probably way more than the aforementioned devices).
With that said, I am still looking for the perfect note-taking app for my personal use. It should have the following features:
As small as possible, so I can install it on older, not-so-large storage capacity devices of mine.
The ability to save notes in a format that can be opened on PC (either with the same app or other apps).
I already found some that might fit the bill, but I am not sure which one to pick. Guess I'll figure it out.
I purchased a ream of HP Premium32 printer paper in 2020 and found a couple of sites that offer ruled paper templates. I use the templates to print my own writing paper on a black and white laser printer.
It isn’t Clairefontaine, but it is very nice to write on. I highly recommend it.
It’s the same, the difference is the starting “0” size. For the A-series, the area is 1 m^2. For the B-series, the shorter side length is 1 m. The C-series is the geometric mean of the areas of the A- and B-series.
My go to is TR 68gsm. I really love CAL too. I have no idea what I will replace them with yet since they both are discontinued. I enjoy Midori MD, but I wish it came in ivory. For notepads I use as scratch pads, I use Rhodia since it’s relatively cheap and FP friendly.
That being said, I am in the middle of trying out new paper to replace my go to paper. So far I like Maruman Nmemesoine, but the lack of non-spiral bound notebook variety is a big sticking point. Kokuyo Perpernap is up next. I have high hopes.
I’m told the latest iteration of TR is very close to old TR classic 52gsm. I guess that will be my fallback.
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