Black - Aurora

I love fountain pen inks and I love also that there are so many varieties. Hundreds of colours, with or without sheen and/or shimmer. But sometimes I need to write with black. Not any black. No. It has to be a good deep dark black that doesn't turn greyish when you write with it. For years I have used this ink by Aurora. With the name "Black". Not only for writing but maybe even more for sketching is this a great black ink. Have a look...

I'll tell you about the sketch later (because I'm sure this makes you wonder). No..., writing samples first.

Now, that is black. The least black is the TR paper. But that could just be the F nib on my Lamy Safari. When I did the scribbles beside it with my Kakimori nib is showed up darker. As you can see I was too fast taking these photos for the blog and forgot to do the water test. But I can tell you from experience that this is not a permanent ink and easily dilutes in water when it's dried up. That makes it good for monotone washes in the sketches.

The ink gives on the smooth Iroful and Tomoe River paper a beautiful coppery sheen. But not in the writing. Just in the puddles.

The chromatography is interesting. At the bottom it makes a big fat black line. Then follows a grey yellow and grey blue. It ends with a dark purple grey. All very muted and grainy.

And finally the sketch. I love this Aurora black a lot for making sketches with water washes. It makes lovely gradients and dissolves just enough when I go over the dried ink with a wet brush. The diluted black doesn't look "dead". There is enough colour in the ink to make it nice. The ink is a bit pricey. But I am willing to pay a bit more for a good ink that works so well and always gives good results in my sketches.

So... It's me. On the floor of the big white studio of the Art Academy of Arnhem. When I studied there I had to make in my first year a study on shapes. That entire project on my "personal" shapes took about half a year. Starting with doodling shapes in a dummy with a black marker. The shapes that I enjoyed most were taken from the hundreds of shapes in the dummy. From this selection I had to create varieties. From those the best were picked and those (maybe 6 shapes or so) had to be cut out of black paper and put in different arrangements and compositions. The next part of this project was to enlarge the shapes to man-size shapes. So around 1.80 meter. Those shapes had to be cut out of huge pieces of heavy cardboard and painted black. Finally the shapes had to be photographed in 3 different locations. First location was on the (big and white) outside wall of the academy. Then in the large white studio of the academy. The floors, walls and ceiling were all painted white. And finally I had to make a series of photos on location. I picked the forest in my village for that.

BTW, I hated this project. It felt like torture at the time. I think now, many years later, that I did learn a lot from this though. But sketching this was most definitely much more fun than fighting with the big cardboard shapes on the bus and train.