Cult Pens (Diamine) Deep Dark Purple

[Jeph]

Now to the bad news: I still have not found my dark purple, so I am interested to see what you end up with for that.

Have you looked at or considered Cult Pens/Diamine Deep Dark Purple? I don't have the ink myself, yet, but it's on my list and what I've seen is very nice. Imagine Diamine Eclipse, but with some colour!

That quote was from this thread that I don't want to de-rail any further.

Thanks to my firend Rui, I now have a bottle of the Cult Pens exclusive Deep Dark Purple from Diamine. In short it is almost exactly the dark purple that I have been looking for. At a glance it is black, but under strong light or close inspection it is clearly purple. There is very little shading and it is a little flat (lacking in sheen) but the color is exactly what I wanted. I will not be able to post writing scans until Monday but I had to share my excitement. So far I have only used it in an M200 with .7mm CI nib on Rhodia but it will be going into more pens very soon.

I need to have a discussion with Cult Pens about my shipping address not matching my billing address so that we can come to some mutually agreeable terms. Because not only do I want more Deep Dark Purple, but I am curious about their Deep Dark Green as well.

[Jeph]

As promised, here is a writing sample scan. This is only 1/6th the original size, so higher resolution is available if needed.
This was done with a steel .8mm CI M200. I went a little overboard on the wetness test. Not only was there bleedthrough there, but there was bleedthrough on the page underneath it. I think I dug into the paper a little bit with the edges of the nib in my crayon coloring zeal. There is actually some nice shading and in a drier pen there might actually be slightly more. But this is indeed the purple that I have been looking for.

Edit: when I took it off the scanner I saw that the spot in the wetness test that looks like a hole through the paper is in fact a hole through the paper. Doh!
Edit2: The red around the cross-hatch is on the glass of my scanner. It is time for a cleaning.

Deep Dark Purple 6th.jpg

[RuiFromUK]

Hi Jeph,

You are most welcome.

The ink really looks great to me too and I am tempted to get it for my OBB nib which should also give justice to this ink. Even at this resolution I can still see some shading which makes the ink even more exciting.

Enjoy it as I will when I order a bottle for myself.

Kind regards,

Rui

[KaBe]

Nice colour!
on the thread 'Merlot', we've been discussing dark purple as well. More specifically: Diamine Grape. Looks a lot like this deep dark purple. (And has the samen Diamine origin). Anyone who has both and is prepared to offer us a comparative writingsample (using the same pen for both)? Comparing the separate scans on the screen (the scan above and the handwritten review on Diamine Grape that Heath provided us with, see p3 of the ink reviews) seems to be of little use: the differences within the writing samples is larger than between the samples...

[Jeph]

I have Grape, Damson and Majestic Purple as well. I just loaded the M200 CI full, but maybe I can use a dip pen at home and put together a comparison. Yes, that is my plan. What is the good of having a pile of dip pen nibs if they never get used? I will post that tomorrow. Grape did not give the the dark line like this from an EF nib like I had hoped. I had the same issue with Damson. And almost all of my nibs are wet.

[trhall]

I like bluer purples and Diamine Bilberry fits that quite nicely. You don't happen to have that anywhere, do you, Jeph? Would be a nice comparison to Grape, Damson, Majestic Purple, and DDP.

[mtnbiker62]

I wonder how this compares to Private Reserve Ebony Purple? I have used that ink, and on most papers it just looks black to me. It's hard to see the purple at all.

[Cake]

As a regular user of PR Ebony Purple, I think it has more of a grey black tone than Diamine DDPurple.

[Scrawler]

I like purples and I pretend that purple/black inks are actually black, when I have to sign in black. I used to use Poussierre de Lune, but now use Akkermans Vourhout Violet, which I find indistinguishable from this ink.

[Jeph]

It was my intention to use an extreme flex dip pen nib for these tests. There were two problems with that. One was that everything just looked black, even the Majestic Purple. The other was that I don't have the skill to drive a needlepoint properly. Instead I selected a fine, medium and bold pen and used all of them dipped with each ink. After each sample I would wick the ink out with a paper towel until no combination of contact and pressure could coax any color out after 60 seconds. They still look darker than I experience in actual use. I surmise that dipping the pens equates to a super-wet condition and lays down a more saturated line than normal. The color that the BB line shows most closely resembles what I see in use with all nibs, with the color getting slightly darker as the line width gets smaller. And sorry, I don't have Bilberry.

I used a Rhodia A5 Dot Pad

The name and first entry was made with a Waterman Skywriter. (I had forgotten how wonderful that nib was.) It writes a fine line and I chose it for the lack of feed fins to speed up color changes.

The second entry was with a Carl Kuhn & Cos. (Wien aka Vienna Austria ) Monte Christo No 52 F dip pen nib.

The third entry was made with a Kaweco V12 BB.

The fourth entry was made with a q-tip.

My description of each color:

Majestic Purple: This is more of a bright purple. I like it a great deal, but other than this test it is usually too bright.

Damson: This is my most disappointing of the group. It feels more like a washed out attempt at dark purple.

Grape: This one surprised me a little bit. Had this ink written like this all of the time I would not have kept looking. In this test it looks better than my previous mixture of Eclipse and Majestic Purple I made after I tried the Grape and the Damson and did not see what I wanted. I call this more of a rich darkish purple.

Deep Dark Purple: It is hard to tell that this is darker than the Grape. It is, but just barely. It is interesting that the q-tip swab of this turned nearly black with green (!???!) edges on the double pass where the Grape turned a darker durple. The vertical blob to the right is a second swab I made in case I somehow contaminated the first one. And with the dip pen it almost looks like a bluish black. I can’t explain why either of those things happened. I still like this one the best but it might just be because I want to.

Side note: There was no show-through with any color in any application.
I guarantee that your results will vary because my own results did.

I had to choke this picture down to 25% at 600 dpi and it is still probably too big. The 1200 dpi scan was something like 170 MB raw.

Purples 600 qtr.jpg

[RuiFromUK]

From the abofe I still prefere the deep dark purple from Cult pens. It has a lovely depth with a colour shade that I really enjoy.

[KaBe]

WOW wat a nice job well done. Thanks for spending your evening behind the desk playing with pens and inks...
Tschüss

[jacksterp]

Thanks much for the four sample scan.

Think I like the Cult Pen's ink the best.