Last month, when I visited Adamstown Art, I was given a bottle of Dr. Ph. Martin’s Ocean Fountain Pen Ink to test out. I immediately put some in my standard writing pen – TSWBI Eco and then in my favourite sketching pen – Sailor de Mannen 55-degree Fude pen. The Eco is the most reliable pen in my collection for pigmented ink and the Fude is one of the more temperamental!

The best way to test new ink is simply to use it in everyday situations and see if I notice anything different. The ink performed well in both pens and it seems to dry quickly enough for my rapid sketching. This test was to do a quick line drawing of a Baroque facade (I actually did this before the start of June and my current 30×30 challenge) and then immediately start painting. As there are a lot of details in a Baroque facade, there are lots of ink beads in the linework. I didn’t notice any difference from usual. (The ink that I normally use is De Atramentis Document Ink.)

The lines on the bottom of the page were an attempt to work out drying time – the lines on the right were drawn 1 minute 30 seconds before painting and the ones on the left 30 seconds. The beads on the lines on the left side had not fully dried by the time I applied the paint.

The ink doesn’t flow quite as well as De Atramentis Document Ink and seems to take a little longer to dry but it’s comparable with other pigmented inks I’ve used – Platinum Carbon, Super5, SketchInk. So it’s certainly another ink suitable for ink and wash sketching. It also comes red and blue – and I’m particularly interested in the blue!

I still need to do some more tests… but so far so good.

Has anyone else used it? How do you find it?

Update 4 July 2022

I’ve recently purchased the Blue Ocean Ink to use instead of Lamy Turquoise water-soluble ink.

I love the colour of the Lamy ink and have used it for notes/text on my pages for a number of years. 

But if my book gets wets… it’s a disaster! (This is from a sketchbook that got drenched with water in July 2021)

My initial tests with the Ocean Blue ink showed that it wasn’t totally permanent and it was a little darker than the Lamy Turquoise. But after adding a little De Atramentis Document Dilution Solution I now have ink that is the perfect hue with nice shading.

I told myself “The fact that the ink is not totally permanent should be ok – I don’t want to paint over this ink  – and it is a big improvement over the Lamy ink.”

And then on the weekend I somehow managed to knock over a glass of water – right onto my sketchbook. What are the odds of that happening? Anyway, this photo shows the damage which is fairly minimal considering the amount of water dumped on part of my book.

So I’m very happy to finally have a better solution for my blue ink!