Highlighters for fountain pen ink - troubles and revelations!

[jace]

I have all but given up on trying to highlight fountain pen inks but I made a discovery today and found a really good highlighter by accident. TL;DR it's particular colors of COPIC markers (which are alcohol based).

Most water-based highlighters would smudge your fountain pen inks because most FP inks are water-soluble (I don't use high maintenance non-dye inks), so this should be obvious unless there is some magic I don't know about.

One would think to use alcohol-based highlighters like a COPIC marker, but unfortunately, alcohol-based inks tend to bleedthrough and showthrough extremely easily, even with good paper.

So I concluded that it's not going to be easy to highlight FP ink - there is an article on JetPens talking about highlighters but I am lazy and didn't bother to read it.

But today I was like screw it, I wanted to highlight a paragraph with a COPIC without caring about the writing behind the paper, I used the color Ice Ocean BG72 and it actually didn't bleed through and showedthrough very very minimally (I used Stalogy paper). Wow - what a revelation... who knew that it depended on the color mattered. I have an intuition that it has nothing to do with whether the color is light or dark because there are some very light yellows (highlighter yellows) that bled through and showed through, so you have to be patient and swatch test and experiment with different papers but it is much easier than I make it out to be. Once you find a color that works, you can stick with it for a while.

Now... I am highlighting everywhere, it's a valid way to put some color to your writing as an alternative to using colored inks.

Some of you are probably like - I knew that LONG ago... what a newb. So...what do you know about highlighting FP inks? I want to know!