Robert Oster - Black Violet

[azkid]

I love all things purple and ink especially. Of the dozens of inks I have sampled, about a quarter have been purple.

Along the way, I discovered Diamine Damson and J. Herbin Poussiere de Lune and with them, a love of dark, dusky purples.

I would love to use either as a daily work ink but Damson is a bone-dry writer and Pouiserre de Lune is a bit too light.

Enter Robert Oster's Black Violet. Aptly named, it is more black than violet, darker than Damson. It also flows well in my Pilot Stargazer (F) and the nib feels lubricated on the page like RO Carbon Fire, one of my favorite inks.

The ink exhibits some shading even with cursive, but even more when printing. As the ink is so dark, the effect is relatively subtle.

Dry times are around 15 seconds on Clairefontaine Triomphe paper. The ink behaves well on this and on more absorbent My Essential bullet journal paper that I use for work.

It will only feather or bleed through if you put down a huge amount of ink as you might when sketching a very dark value. Interestingly, on Tomoe River, the ink has less color saturation, appearing more gray.

I've noticed no creep or crud on the nib and feed. Finally, it is somewhat waterfast, surviving several seconds of exposure to a water droplet and to running water, leaving behind a cloudy, ethereal remnant of the original print. All I ask for in a work ink is to survive a quickly cleaned-up spill. This does that.

This ink is insanely hard to photograph accurately with my phone camera but I adjusted the color curves on the darker end of the photo to be as accurate as I could make it without throwing off the color of the paper.

At some point I will try this ink out in different pens and may update this thread with the results. Carbon Fire was sort of magical in that it seemed to flow well in everything so I'm curious to see if this product does as well.

From my Ink Journal:



Waterfastness, running water on the left, droplet on the right: