Rohrer and Klingner ink swatches

Ink Swatches – Rohrer & Klingner

In today’s post I’d like to show you all the colors available in the standard line of inks from the famous Rohrer & Klingner as well as their Dokumentus line which adheres to the ISO 12757-2 standard which means they are certified , resistant to ethanol, hydrochloric acid, ammonia, bleach , water (obviously), erasure and are lightfast.

There’s also another standard, ISO 14145-2 which some other manufacturers use like Montblanc.

First things first, I’d like to talk a little bit about the creation process of these swatches since I plan to upload all of my ink collection as I have the time. Each swatch is made by dipping a cotton swab into the ink and drawing lines on the ink card. This is repeated when I reach halfway through for the ink color to remain saturated (it’s clearly visible on the Rohrer & Klingner Verdigris swatch). Some inks don’t require this though, these inks I feel are really well lubricated and are nicely saturated throughout the swabbing. The inks that exhibit behavior are usually the ones which don’t offer shading.

After this is done, I let it dry and then using a dip pen I write down the manufacturer and name of the ink as well as the required www.pennonia.eu “watermark”. Creating these swatches as it turns out takes a lot of time!

The paper I used is a pure white, textured 180g card from my own Tintenbuchs. I created these specifically because I have a huge collection of inks (100+) and this is a great way for me to keep tabs on what each color in my collection looks like.

An important note I would like to highlight is that I use a color calibrated display to adjust the color of the scans to match the real life color of the ink as closely as possible when viewed in a sunlit room. Here are some technically details: The scanner I used is a Brother DCP-L2532W multifunctional printer. Each card is scanned at 600 DPI and edited in Affinity Photo. The monitor I’m using is a DELL P2416D which covers the sRGB color range completely. For calibration I’m using a Spyder4PRO colorimeter. This of course doesn’t mean what I see is what you’ll see but this does provide something for those people who also have a color calibrated display.

You can check out all the inks from Rohrer & Klingner on our shop at this link.

Unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to get my hands on their line of sketch inks but I’ll be sure to complete my Rohrer & Klingner ink swatch collection! My personal favorites are:

I’d love to hear your opinions on these inks! Which is the best color? Are they better or worse than other inks from different brands? Why do you love or hate a color?