India ink vs acrylic ink6/3/2023 I know Ziller Ink is acrylic and pretty popular in the community so maybe I’ll give it another try and will find that maybe I just used bad acrylic ink, but in my experience, it gave me thick hairlines, was a pain to clean off my nibs and pooled in my underturns. I have tried a few acrylic brands and just decided I didn’t like them. ![]() But they are also usually pretty thick and in my experience don’t flow too well. AcrylicĪcrylic inks are pigment that use acrylic emulsions as binder. They tend to be more lightfast, but thus thicker and as said before, result in thicker hairlines. There are pretty few pigmented inks that work for fountain pens, most of them are Calligraphy Inks. ![]() ![]() They will usually say pigmented ink somewhere on the bottle. So why do we need this as a separate type? There are certain inks that do not certify as any of the above because they use different binding materials for the pigments and have other components added. Acrylic, India, Sumi and Watercolor all contain pigments and are those “pigmented” inks. This basically just means that the ink contains color that is not fully dissolved, in other words it does have little pieces inside that are solid. This is basically a general Category that is one of those annoyingly unspecific words. I think there are waterproof dyes but most commonly those inks aren’t either of those two. That means that dye based inks aren’t the best for Calligraphy if you want to use them with cheap paper or care about lightfastness and permanence. One of the disadvantages of dye based inks is that they are usually thinner than other inks and because they don’t really have any “pieces” in them, they tend to imbue the paper a bit more, that means if you don’t have a good coating on your paper, you’ll get some pretty heavy bleeding. Dyes are colors that fully dissolve in the liquid, they tend to be pretty cheap and rather vibrant, however due to their nature they tend to be less lightfast than other types of inks. Fountain Pen inks are dye based inks, at least most of them. Okay, this is the reason why the word Fountain Pen is even in that little paragraph up there. Different types of Inkīefore I jump into this I want to talk about the different types of inks that we generally know and use in the Calligraphy and Fountain Pen world and give you a quick rundown of the characteristics of each of the types. I do not like them because they tend to be really hard to work with for me, or result in much thicker hairlines, tend to pool in turning points and are overall not enjoyable to use for me. The inks I do never recommend to anyone are acrylic inks and shellac based inks, since I’ve had bad experiences with those. If you’ve read any of my content on inks and/or talked to me about it you’ll know that I do have a pretty strong opinion on certain types of ink, which I’ve basically completely given up on, I own some but I will not use them if I can avoid them. And I think it’s generally very interesting. I personally eat meat and am thus not a vegan, but since I know a bunch of people in this lettering community are, this might be helpful to you. When I shared some information about this on Instagram a while ago I was contacted by a few vegans who were a bit surprised but also really thankful because they hadn’t realized that those paints were not animal-product-free. But first we’ll dive a bit into different types of inks you can get nowadays and learn all about the differences. ![]() So let’s talk about my Top 5 (alright, it’s 6…) Black inks. But black and me in Calligraphy didn’t have the easiest of starts, because I tried a lot of inks I didn’t like. So to say that me and black ink go way back is a bit of an understatement, since it’s basically been with me for most of my life, since I was around 8 years old. Me and black ink were a pretty big thing and if you look at old notebooks of mine, before all of my dark reds and burgundies and turquoise they are pretty much exclusively written in black. That was before Social Media and before I learned about this wonderfully amazing thing we call Online Shopping so all I knew was a very limited palette of ink, notably Royal Blue (urgh), Dark Green (not allowed in School), Red (loved it, also prohibited), Pink (my top favorite, but also not okay in school) and black (OMG, it’s allowed to use, it’s not freaking royal blue and it’s kinda awesome!). Back in my school days I got/had to use fountain pens every day and I’m gonna be honest, I just never liked the default royal blue. Me and black ink have a pretty strong bond and somewhat of a long history.
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