Organizing My Ink Samples

I've been wanting to group my samples by color, similar to my swatch library binder. But I was wondering how to organize SO MANY little plastic sample vials in an optimized way. I looked around at vial storage solutions on 3D printing sites, other vial holders online, but none seemed good for me, due to how many vials I have.

For a while I kind of forgot about this project, but I saw a thread about sample organization a while ago where someone said she just uses Ziploc bags because they take up less space. I figured that for version 1.0 of my sample organization, that'll do fine. My office is far from being set up properly for all my hobby stuff, so this simple solution suits me for now.

I scrounged up all my samples, even ones that are a few years old (!!) and started grouping them by basic colors in batches – blue, green, purple, brown/yellow, red/pink, black/gray, teal, and "odd" for those inks that don't really fit one color thanks to chromoshading, or something else.

Break it (the data) down

I was surprised to see how many blue ink samples I've accumulated considering how little I tend to ink up my pens with blue ink now. I guess when I initially got into a dusky, shader ink phase, a lot of my ink sampling was for blues. Purples were the next most-accumulated, followed by green and brown/yellow. This wasn't surprising, since purple is my favorite color, and I've been in a brown and swampy green kind of mood for a long time now.

I was, however, surprised by how many reds I have, though that's because I was briefly on a search for a good red, probably for Christmastime. I generally don't want to write with red inks due to my inability to find a red ink I truly like. A few of the samples in that bag are nice enough for me to want to use them...someday.

Black/gray, teal, and odd inks are the last in line. I like gray ink a lot, but I think I went ahead and bought bottles of gray inks rather than faffing about with samples, the same with certain "odd" inks I read about.

Yes, I think you can have too many inks

I am feeling somewhat annoyed, or maybe the better word is fatigued, by how many samples I have (not to mention whole-ass bottles 😆) because I want to keep using certain favorites all the time, but then I think, "I have so many inks, I should not keep using the same ones!" At the same time, I do get tired of using the same inks for months on end, so I appreciate the variety I have waiting in the wings when I want a change. I just know logically, that if I only write with my inks, at this rate there is no possible way I will ever finish every sample and bottle in my collection (and yet, I always keep my eye out for more new inks to buy). I really should get myself some nice watercolor paper so I can make some art with my ink library, particularly using inks I don't want to write with.

What next?

The next phase of this ink sample-wrangling project is to make new swatches for them. I think there are several samples that I haven't properly added to my swatch binder yet, because I initially swatched them separately for blog posts and never followed up with proper "swatch cards".

But I also have changed how I want to swatch inks to help see more of the base color and other properties. I was using a folded nib before, but it tends to dump a lot of ink on the page, which can kind of mask the base color and obliterate shading if the ink is super dark and saturated. More recently, I've been dripping a couple drops of ink using a glass eyedropper, and spread the ink into a circular swatch using the flat metal cap of a glass sample vial. Then under the written swatch label, I also scribble across the bottom of the swatch card using the dip pen to show more of what the ink could look like from a pen, as opposed to the swatch, which can sometimes be deceiving.

Maybe I can also build out palettes of colors that are either similar, or show off colors that could go well together, like maybe for a more thematic batch of currently inked pens. What other ways do you like to play with your ink library?