Parallel Pen Test

On Monday of this week I did a post on drawing with a Pilot Parallel Pen. I included a You Tube video of  Brett Weldele using distress ink in his pen.  That really excited me because there is so much potential there!  

DR left question in Monday's comments that I couldn't answer, so I decided to do a little test.  

I had saved an empty cartridge from the pen so I decided to put some water in it and add a few drops of StampinUp! Refill ink (the only kind that I have) and see if that would work.  It was really kind of tricky because I don't have a syringe so I had to improvise.  I stuck a water brush down into the cartridge as far as it would go (there's a little black piece about 1/4" down so that was as far as I could go) I then squeezed the water brush so that the water went down into the cartridge... very cool, very easy.  However, the trick came when I had to add the ink.  I couldn't squeeze it as hard as I did the water brush because ink would have gone EVERYWHERE!  I just squeezed it enough to fill that 1/4" space then pushed it onto the nib....when I turned it over the water drew the color into the cartridge.

And then I started writing.  You'll noticed that I had not cleaned out the nib before I started this whole process so there was still A LOT of black ink inside the nib.  Normally, I would have stopped and cleaned the nib but I was curious just how far I could go with the black before it went to the pure red.  See below... I got three pages worth and started getting REALLY BORED writing...you can see towards the end

The big red blog was some of the pure color directly out of the ink bottle...because I really wanted to know what color I was looking for!

When I finally started getting mostly red it was actually pink so I knew that more ink was needed, it was too weak.    So, I added another few drops.  I'm guessing that it might be about 2 parts water to 1 part ink....but that really is a guess.  If you want to try it you just have to test until you are happy.

Now, I am pretty certain that I won't be doing this again until I get a syringe!

I have ZERO CLUE what this is actually doing to the pen itself!  I only decided to test it because Brett does it... I figured it was worth the lose of a $6 (with Michael's coupon) pen to see what it would do....BUT, if  you decide to do it,  it is AT YOUR OWN RISK!

What I know is this, I now want more Parallel Pens!