Ink of the Week: Colorverse Kuiper Belt
Little bit of story time… back in 2018 I was working at a small museum in southeastern Utah. We lived in a dark sky area. For those who haven’t encountered that before, a dark sky area is where light pollution doesn’t obscure the night sky. That part of Utah also benefits from being the high desert, so there is rarely any cloud cover.
Our museum had a telescope silo with a Celestron catadioptric-style telescope (I think) and also a set of large Dobsonian telescopes that we would use from the ground. We also had several solar scopes and a solar filter for the Celestron. We were doing a lot of work from a STEM grant to teach youth about light and astronomy, so we did a lot of looking at the sky (and staying up very late to do the programs for the public once a month). I have a distinct memory of a very clear (and cold!) night in the winter where we managed to get a clear view of Andromeda Galaxy and the middle-schoolers using the telescopes weren’t that impressed, haha! I guess it’s hard to conceive of 2.5 million light years when you’re 12. Even if you tell them that when the light left that galaxy the Ice Age had just started. They probably thought they were in the Ice Age since I remember it being very cold in the middle night in January on the plateau.
This is a long way of saying that I was paid to become a space nerd for a year and that space nerdiness brought me to be a big fan of Colorverse. They’ve expanded now but in those early days they mostly focused on outer space themes.
Enter the New Horizons limited edition created to celebrate the New Horizons spacecraft passing by and photographing 2014 MU69 aka Arrokoth, which at the time was the farthest object explored up close. This same spacecraft had provided us with up-close images of Pluto in 2015. In the set there are 4 inks - Beyond Pluto, Pioneer Container, Arrokoth, and Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is where both Pluto and Arrakoth are in orbit around the sun.
The ink color that Colorverse chose was a deep, dark blue. Functionally, it’s pretty much a black but on some papers you can get it to look more like a very dark blue-black. It flows well, but can be dry on some papers. The dryness can help bring out the different blue-black tones. I used the ink in my Kaweco liliput copper with a standard B nib, which led to pretty dark lines. I wrote through a fill easily. Dark inks are useful for focus for me. It’s now on the second fill and I’m still enjoying it.
In comparison with a few other inks in my collection, Kuiper Belt is:
blacker than Birmingham Locomotive and De Atrementis Steam Locomotive.
much bluer in comparison with Papier Plume Cafe Diabolique.
fits in with this selection of Colorverse blacks. They all have a bit of copper-brown sheen. However, Sunspot is more black, as is The Void, and Eclipse Silence has monster sheen. It was so sheeny that I was worried the ink hadn’t dried on the Tomoe River paper.
Sheeny, shiny Colorverse blacks.
The writing sample and ink swatches were done on 68 gsm old Tomoe River paper Odyssey Notebooks A5 (with the moon on the cover).
Overall, I really like this ink and all of the colors in this set. I played with Pioneer Container a bit last year (it’s a soft purple-gray), but Beyond Pluto (olive green) and Arrokoth (light brown) might need to have some pen time this year.
Surprisingly, I was able to find this limited edition still available at Pen Boutique and Dromgoole’s. At $60 it’s not on the cheap end and can be seen as a little pricey for four 15mL bottles. Despite that, I think it’s a very well thought out limited edition and I am very fond of the inks within.
