For those of you who are familiar with Noodler’s inks, you’ll understand when I say that I consider this brand to be… well… very different to any other fountain pen ink brand. I have just tested 79 samples, which I’ll post over the coming days, and it’s been very very difficult to classify them. Even though some of them may share a common name theme, and there are some really great names here, it doesn’t mean that they may share similar behavioural patterns. Indeed far from it – they all behave totally different from one another. So what I’ve done, is try to classify groups of up to 12 by their visual behaviour.

This first batch I’ve called The Blacks, and I hope you can see why. When subjected to the water treatment all of them have a black sediment that floats on top of the dyes and dries in varying degrees of coarseness depending on the ink. Apart from Whalemans’s Sepia, non of the others wanted to react with the bleach. But that’s not a problem, because the results are all visually gorgeous. Just look at those colour breakdowns! From a creative perspective, I will have to explore all of these again as they are all so textural. All of the inks flow through the nib easily and write very well, but who would have thought that all that colour and texture could come from a couple of drops of ink? The handwriting colour certainly gives no indication as to what lies beneath. Amazing! It’s probably worth having a sample of each just because they look so good.

Inks tested: Blackerase, Polar Black, Whaleman’s Sepia, Black Swan in English Roses, Red Black, Brown, Polar Brown, Golden Brown, Zhivago, Polar Green, Blue Nose Bear, Air Corp Blue Black.

All tests on Bockingford 200lb watercolour paper using a Desiderata Daedalus with titanium zebra G flex nib.

Many thanks to Brian and Rachel Goulet for the sample vials: https://www.gouletpens.com

Just for the record – I do this for myself, I receive no remuneration what-so-ever and I tell it exactly how I see it.