The Sharpie ultra thin pens I bought to replace one from a large set are darker blue than I want, and I can’t find one close to color 0057B7. Can anyone recommend another brand of pen that works similarly on postcards?
Do you remember the set? I have a lot of pens and can look through it to see if I have one.
That’s very kind of you. I have the 72 set. In this chart, I’d like to find the techno blue, brilliant blue, or sky.
Favorite general purpose writing pen is a fountain pen, but the inks I like are not water resistant so I don’t use a fountain pen for postcards. My current favorite for postcards are Sakura GellyRoll pens. I’ve also used the ultra fine Sharpies, S Notes (for decorating), Zebra Mildliners, and Bic Intensity. I need to hunt up more colors of the Bic Intensity. They are especially good for postcards with a coating on them. No smudging! I just picked up a set of Sakura Glaze pens that I’m curious to try. Has anyone used them?
Best,
Laurel
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I like using a variety of colors of Le Pen brand fine liner pens.
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I need help to translate this pen please! Anyone? Anyhow, this is one of my favorite pens and want to know where I can get another like it. I received it as a gift when my husband was stationed in Japan. I wonder if it is Sanrio?
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It’s a simple/easy-to-find pen over here but I like the brand Artline, specifically the Artline 220 Fineliner 0.2mm Black. I have dyspraxia and my handwriting is horrible, but this pen helps my writing look somewhat ‘cute’ as opposed to ‘chaotic/messy’ and it also helps me fit a LOT on my postcards 
I like to write long letters when I send postcrossing! So fineliners seem to be my best bet for that.
As an artist who is concerned with the longitivity of her works, I just want to remind people to be careful with the lightfastness of the ink you are using, especially if you plan on displaying your writing in some way.
Between 2014 and 2015, I conducted a (semi-scientific) lightfastness test on various writing/calligraphy instruments with different ink property in my possession. I will leave out the description of the protocol unless someone is intersted in knowing it, and show you some of the results:
These are the results of the inked samples after X hours of exposure under direct sunlight. As you can see, some of them didn’t resist to fading at all.
However, before everyone panic, I should point out that
- I was exposing the inked samples under an extreme condition. If you keep your writings properly under ‘normal’ to ‘very good’ conservation condition – e.g. in the shade, with humidifier, etc. – your writing shouldn’t fade so badly so quickly. It will still fade over time, but at a much slower rate. For comparison, here is my classnote written a few years before the experiement was conducted, using (if I remember correctly) Pilot Hi-Tec C. It was conserved over the years in a storage box in the shade, in Montreal, and every stroke is still visible today:
What had visibly fade are the highlighters.
- The manufacturer might have changed the ink formula since I purchased the writing instruments (Pilot Hi-Tec-C maybe around 2012 or so). What seems to be terribly light-sensitive 10 years ago doesn’t mean it’s still so.
If you don’t plan on ever displaying your writing under environment light, you shouldn’t worry too much about this lightfastness property. But if you do, this is something to be careful in case you want your works to last for several generations.
I have also conducted the lightfastness test on several brands’ fountain pen inks, if anyone wants me to share the result here or somewhere on the forum, simply let me know.
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I would be interested in the fountain pen inks results - especially those that claim to be archival
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Sure. Here you go 
Note that the Iroshizuku Asa-gao ink was later added to the list, when the other inks have already been exposed for about 100 hours. So the weather condition of the two batches of ink samples wasn’t identical, even though the exposure time is the same.
As a comparison, here is the inked sample produced using calligraphy/drawing black inks that are pigment-based:
(It stops at 180 hours because the sample was eaten by the dog or blown away by the wind – I don’t remember exactly 
)
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Kuretake’s Zig Calligraphy pen and Zig Clean Colour brush pen:
As you can see, the Zig Clear Colour line is not very lightfast. As for the Calligraphy line, it depends on the colours, despite the ‘archival’ claim on all the pen bodies.
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Note that what I meant by Noodler’s Eternal Black is Noodler’s Black. I remember when I purchased this ink some 15 years ago, it was advertised as the only eternal black ink so somehow the word ‘eternal’ just sticks with this ink in my mind. Sorry for the confusion! The catfish on my bottle looks slightly different than the one on Noodler’s webpage though.
In general, Noodler’s stand up to its archival claim, except its purple Tchaikovsky (I got the first generation) that is a notorious difficult colour to make in the entire history of art. If you paint, you would have noticed that good quality purple paint (like colbalt violet) is among the most expensive one in a given brand’s product line.
For Pilot’s Iroshizuku line – I never found Pilot claiming it being lightfast, however, I have read someone’s comment (on a fountain pen forum) that he/she had asked Pilot the question, and Pilot claimed that the whole line was lightfast. You can judge this claim by referring to the rest result.
Generally speaking, pigment-based inks are more lightfast than dye-based inks, but using them also requires more frequent pen maintenance. And sadly, a lot of fountain pen inks are dye-based. I was told that Noodler’s inks are ‘cellulose reactive inks’ – which I know nothing about (I was and still am really bad in chemistry )
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I’m bad at chemistry too 
but I believe Noodler’s achieves its permanence by having the dyes bind with the cellulose inside the paper fibres (pulp?). You cannot remove the ink unless you destroy the paper itself.
Which is why the ink will come straight off plastic sheets - no cellulose in those.
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Have you done any test on Copic markers?
I used Uni-ball Signo 0.38mm and it’s really a good pen. I keep several pens for over a decade without using it during that period. It is still usable after a decade! The ink flow like any other pen. It didn’t become dried.
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Sadly, no. I don’t have Copic markers.
All of these are amazing! Thank you for sharing the results with us!
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It kind of looks like that, sort of. The character definitely does.
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