Tom's Studio New Forest
Greens, Greens for summer ...
Tom's Studio is a fountain pen company out of the UK. They caught my attention late last year with the release of their inks that were available in the US. According to the website, Tom's Studio got their start when he created a pen for his wife, a calligrapher. Tom's Studio has since released many new cool and innovative products.
Today though I'm focused on the ink. I've got two inks from Tom's Studio, and my newest pickup is New Forest. At time of this writing New Forest is in stock at Atlas Stationers.
My wife bought me New Forest for our anniversary and immediately I had to get it into a pen. This is a beautiful forest green, it's a standard ink, though in larger swatches there is some red sheen. I put this ink into a TWSBI with a medium nib. The flow is good and this is a wet ink from the TWSBI nib.
The chromatography shows blues and yellows, as expected. I like this chromatography though, this one looks neat.
Sample writing, swatches and line variation tests on small test notebooks from Mauraman Mnemosyne, Apica, Travelers, Rhodia, and Clariefontaine. These swatches are done with Dominant Industry's new ink muddler.
The sheen does not come through on the Apica but the shading does. No feathering or bleed through from the writing. Although I did see bleed through from the large swatch, but that is expected.
Mnemosyne paper has become a fast favorite because it’s very good at showing ink properties. Here the sheen can be seen in the large swatch. Some shading is also present.
This is on Rhodia Dot Pad paper. Shading is visable in the larger swatch and the lettering, but looking closely there is some feathering in the letters. I’m not sure if the scans show it.
On the Traveler’s paper the ink is nice. The shading comes through and little bits of the sheen come through on larger swatches.
New Forest performs very well on TR. No surprise there, I suppose. In the large swatch the sheen is visable. Shading is visable in the writing.
New Forest also performs well on Clairfontaine. The sheen isn’t visable, however, the shading is.
On all the smaller writing samples New Forest performs very well. Sheen is visable in larger swatches on most of the test papers. I suspect that is due to the coating on the paper if the sheen shows. Shading is good on all the papers. Dry time is very quick on all papers, between 10 - 20 seconds.
Now onto the longer writing samples. I’ve been getting into some different papers, so included in these samples is paper from Yu-Sari, which I’m starting to like very much. It’s similar to Iroful, without the feeling of the nib dragging across the paper.
In the larger writing samples, shading is visable to varying degrees, even if the scans didn’t pick it up. There is shading on the Tomoe River and shading is very visable on the Iroful. And on the Yu-Sari the shading is visable and the sheen is visable around the edges, again the scans didn’t pick that up, but it’s there! The flow of the ink is wet, so wet that I didn’t experience the typical drag on the Iroful. Everything was nice a flowy on each of the papers. I’ve really enjoyed using this ink and think it’s perfect going into the summer season.
PS - All ink reviews are my own and have been purchased with my own dollars.