Minimizing smearing: Balancing pen, ink, and paper choices
Looking back across my last month of inked pens, I notice a pattern. I’ve struggled with smearing ink.
This is particularly true with faster writing: especially making and updating checklists, and meetings with students. My weeklies have grown smudgy and smeary.
Welcome to smeartown
Ink can smear for many, often combined, reasons. The ink can be wet and take long to dry. The pen feed can put down a lot of ink when writing. The paper can be resistant to liquid. The air might be humid enough to slow evaporation and absorption. The universe might simply demand an ink swatch from you.
I primarily use Tomoe River and Cosmo Air Light paper. Coated papers encourage smearing, especially for the impatient. TR has a notoriously long dry time. CAL’s is shorter.
More absorbent paper, like Stalogy, has shorter dry times. Stalogy and Leuchtturm paper will cut down on ink smearing. At the cost of losing some sheen and shading.
Spoiled for choice
But I like the shading and sheen my paper encourages. So patience is my key mediator. Waiting 30-60 seconds after writing before touching or turning a page is enough time to allow the inks I use to dry completely.
Using combinations of drier inks and stingier feeds also helps. Dry pairings put less ink on paper, and so lessen drying times.
I turned to four dry inks this week, and put each in a moderate feed. This change cut down in ink smearing considerably. Add the narrowness of my daily driver’s nib to the equation and I had smear-free task management — even on TR paper.
Unsmeared lines of justice
This week’s Inked Tines update includes my most recent currently inked writing tools.
Toolset
Pens. The standout combo this week is the Platinum 3776, with a F nib, inked with KOBE’s Kaigan Stone Grey. A balanced “EF” line: smooth, consistent, quick drying. All-star pairing for scratch notes and task management. Easily used with stencil. Daily driver. 1/3 full.
Lamy Safari (B) — Empty. Broad lines and tremendous shading lent fun to journaling. Took the pair to a few meetings, always with the Diplomat as a counter-balance. Best Lamy nib I own, hands down. Daily carry. Meeting notes, journaling, pocket notes.
Pilot 912 (SF) — Empty. A soft nib brings out the fun sheen in the haloing around the edges of Caribbean Blue’s lines. One of my favorite blues. Popping blue makes for excellent accent notes alongside Kaigan Stone’s muted grey. Meeting notes (accent), reading notes (accent), journaling.
Diplomat Aero (EF) — 1/5. Phenomenal shading, even in an EF nib. Tight EF lines worked well for detailed notes in meetings. The feed was just generous enough get away with longer journaling sessions, too – even if the combo aired out after a page. Higashiyama is an ink I may need a bottle of once the sample vial runs empty. Meeting notes, manuscript editing, journaling, pocket notes once.
Franklin-Christoph 45 (B SIG) — 1/5. Line width is broad enough to relegate this pair to journaling. The amount of sheen keeps this blue fun, especially in a B. And that’s coming from someone who shies away from indigo blues.
Montblanc 146 (EF) — 4/5. Quite toothy with Aonibi in the barrel. Excellent for subdued accent notes, lesson plans, scratch notes, The MB’s weight makes it excellent for long form writing like journaling. I used this pair for everything without incident – or regret. Even drafting a research paper.
Conklin Mark Twain (M SIG) — ??. Combo grew wetter and darker as the week wore on. I suspect there was some leftover dark-colored ink in the sac from a prior fill. Even so, the MT was comfortable and fun to write with. Journaling, lesson plans, some manuscript marking.
Notebooks. Work bujo. Hobonichi Plain A5 Notebook. Eight new pages. I’m up to page 130.
The week begins with a two-page weekly spread, sans smearing.
Last week’s teaching was disjointed as many classes were designed to function asynchronously. My students applied some historical theory to Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. They were tasked with working in groups to place Ibsen’s work into a broader Norwegian context. I used three pages of lesson planning to ensure the sequence of activities tied together sensibly.
The week’s pages conclude with three pages of meeting notes. They’re a hodgepodge of meetings. Some are with students about current projects. Others are meetings with a student who wants to do a summer independent research project on sexual justice and class inequality in India with me. And also disciplinary meetings.
Journal. Unbranded A5 Cosmo Air Light. 12 more pages, spread across five entries. I rotated quickly through this week’s currently inked while journaling. Every pen met CAL paper, except for the Platinum.
Quite a few entries include artifacts like notes from my partner. Washi tape is wonderful for keeping loose paper secure in a journal. Yay.
Aww
Written dry. I wrote two pens dry this week. The Pilot 912 lasted three weeks. Two of those weeks saw heavy use as a notetaking pen. The Pilot ran empty during my writing day on Thursday.
The Lamy Safari was inked the same week as the Pilot. The B nib has been the star of the show. Smooth and wet. The pen went dry while writing some scratch notes outside during my school’s field day Friday.
Newly inked. Stuck to my original seven pens this week. Go me.
The collection
Incoming / new arrivals. No new pens or ink this week.
However, my good friend Shannon returned the Franklin-Christoph 46 Saturday morning.
I lent her then pen so she could try a cursive italic nib. She was ecstatic about the nib. And she reports that she believes larger pens like the 46 are more comfortable for her writing grip. I feel you, Shannon. With very few exceptions.
Outgoing / trades or sales. No movement on this front. The Parker continues to sit in it’s box, listening. And plotting.
Currently reading and listening
Fiction. My partner and I read one more chapter in The Wise Man’s Fear Wednesday. We remain in the setup of act one. Kvothe is treading water at the university. One gets the distinct impression that something major is about to happen.
Nonfiction. I knocked out quite a bit of reading this week.
I revisited four academic articles on legal theory and education policy in preparation for a new publication. The essays span twenty years of scholarship on making schools more safe spaces for LGBTQ students and teachers. And over 230 pages.
I use the Papers app to organize my academic essays and book chapters. The app saves multiple versions of each paper. I have a clean original and an annotated version with my handwriting in the margins and two colors of highlighter sprinkled throughout the prose.
Reading and annotating take place in PDF Reader. So I transferred the annotated version of each essay from Papers on my iMac into PDF Notes on the trusty iPad. I reviewed each, adding new thoughts related to my current project here and there.
New-fangled digital annotations
Music. Mammal Hands — one of my favorite bands to write to — dropped a new single this past Friday. I’ve had their discography on repeat ever since. Imagine a piano and sax had a play date.
