Wearingeul The flowers on the way
Ink Review #71
*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.
Overview
The color/properties:
The flowers on the way is a soft pastel pink. You could call it a floral pink, but it actually reminds me of a pink Starburst. Anyway, it shades slightly with a soft cut between its light and dark tones. A wetter-tuned pen may be able to pool the ink heavily enough to yield harder, darker edges around the shading areas of the ink, but I never experienced this during my tests. There’s also a slight hint of blue in the swatches and splats where this ink shades, but I never encountered this in normal writing.
Ink Splat
Ink Droplets
Performance on paper:
There was minimal bleed-through on the Kokuyo sheet, and no feathering or bleeding on the other test pages. It’s not a very wet ink, and it should be gentle to most fountain pen-friendly papers, even with wet nibs. Surprisingly, the dry times were just average, with the larger nib sizes drying around 20 seconds and the finer nibs drying within 5-10. The water resistance was mostly poor, with light grey shadows left behind where the ink was exposed to water, but larger nibs that lay down more ink may leave faded but-somewhat-legible purple shadows behind. The ink is light, but I didn’t find it difficult to read, especially with the larger nib sizes.
Water resistance
Chromatography
Performance in the pen:
The flowers on the way had a dry flow, and often felt too unlubricated for a comfortable writing experience. The medium, broad, stub, and surprisingly the extra fine were better than expected and tolerable, but the needlepoint, fine, and the architect nib especially felt awfully dry to write with. Your mileage may vary here. Otherwise, the ink mostly worked. The needlepoint and architect felt, at best, marginally functional; all of the other nibs wrote fine and I never experienced any hard starts or skipping. The dry flow, however, would indicate that this ink may have some issues with flex nibs or quick writing.
Thankfully, cleaning was a breeze and the ink washed out of the pen instantly with one squeeze of the bulb syringe. Of course, I soaked the nibs anyway, but there was no need to.
Performance in a pen: 6.5/10
Performance on paper: 9.5/10
Color saturation: 5/10
Sheening: 0/10
Shading: 5/10
Dry time: 7.5/10
Water resistance: 2/10
Ease of cleaning: 10/10
Shimmer: None
My personal thoughts...
When approaching this ink, I can’t help but think about my earlier review of The Sky, Seasons Passing By: I loved the ink overall, but the true enjoyment from that experience was learning about Yun Dong-ju. It’s something I most likely never would have discovered if it weren’t for that ink, and I’m incredibly grateful for that learning experience. I feel a similar sentiment here: The flowers on the way is part of an ink set inspired by Kim So Wol, another renowned poet from Korea.
I did what I could to find the precise work behind this ink, and my initial conclusion was that it was based on the first lines about the blooming flowers in Kim So Wol’s poem “Mountain Flower.” It seemed like the most straightforward answer, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with that uncertainty — I’m still not. I really wish that Wearingeul would be more descriptive about these things. I was pondering over the matter, and reading over the marketing copy when it hit me:
“The Flowers on the Way - This ink portrays the color of azalea leaves withering on the road. From the overall base color of toned down pink and crimson, the ink has a bluish sheen and dries as a color close to violet.” (Wearingeul’s marketing copy)
It’s not “The flowers on the way,” it’s “The flowers on the way!” It all makes sense now! The name, the color, the flowers! It must be related to Kim So Wol’s other work, “Azaleas!” Of course! Or, perhaps, someone at Wearingeul is very clever and crafted an intentionally ambiguous title that relates to both poems. I don’t know — all I have is unclear promotional material.
Now, let’s assume that it’s about Azaleas. Initially, I wasn’t sure this fit the somber tone of the poem. After a moment of thought, however, I thought that perhaps the color of this ink doesn’t need to reflect the sorrowfulness in the poem's tone, but the voice of the poem’s resilience to overcome it. So, the color could be appropriate by different interpretations, or maybe it’s just an arbitrary choice based on the name of the ink. Maybe Wearingeul just likes pink Starburst, who can say? I won’t go deep into the works of Kim So Wol here, but if you’re interested, I’ll leave a few informative links below.
Written in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook with a Lamy Safari (1.1 Stub)
More images/info:
Tools and materials used in the writing samples:
A TWSBI Diamond 580 AL with 7 nib units including a Needlepoint grind, EF, F, M, B, 1.1mm stub, and an Architect grind. All nibs are tuned to perform at the same medium wetness.
A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad
A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook
A 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook
A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook
A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook
Resources used in this review:
‘kolancu한국어 문학 문화’s reading of “Mountain Flower”
A lovely reading of Kim So Wol’s “Mountain Flower”, also translated into English for reading. I quite enjoyed this and highly recommend watching it if you’re interested. This is the translation I used for the writing sample of “Mountain Flower”
“Mountain Flower”, both translated and analyzed — an interesting read.
This is the translation I used for the writing sample of “Azaleas”