Inks ain't inks...

There used to be an ad here in Australia "Oils ain't oils..." which tried to say that not all motor oils are created equal.  I had the 'pleasure' of confirming this theory as it applies to ink yesterday when I was working on a small piece of calligraphy.

In some earlier travels my bottle of bottled ink had leaked and so I was left to consider some long lost bottles that had been sitting in my cupboard. Oh dear. Bad bad bad.

I thought at first I had diluted too much, so kept adding more ink; then I ran out of bond paper for practise and thought maybe its the new paper, then I tried a different bottle and wow they were all dreadful, even on my favourite Arches Velin paper.

A good lesson is keeping your supplies up to date and to not ever accidentally buy the wrong bottle of inks because the label was the same colour and you couldn't read the Japanese characters!

In the end I went for the beautiful ink stick being rubbed on the ink stone and got beautiful beautiful ink!

Altho I must admit I had fun making the marks with the messy ink - at least I can use it to play with.