Review: Speedball Pigmented Acrylic Ink Palette Set (5-bottles)

This is Speedball's Pigmented Acrylic Ink Palette Set (5-bottles).

This Calligraphy Ink set comes with a 10-well rectangular white plastic palette, 4 bottles of highly pigmented acrylic ink in different colours (each bottle having a capacity of 12ml or 0.40 fl oz of ink within) and a bottle of 'pen cleaner' solution (which is useful when you're using these inks with nibs).

The plastic palette consists of 5 rectangular and 5 circular wells - which is very useful if you wish to blend inks of different colors.

You may find the fine print - 'Conforms to ASTM D 4236' at the back of the package. Essentially this means that Speedball has complied with the standard procedure to clearly label on the product packaging all potentially hazardous components. In this case, there is none - as the inks and 'pen cleaner' solution are all non-toxic.

The 4 different colors of acrylic ink are namely:

• Silver
• White
• Super Black
• Gold

From left: Opened bottles of Black, Gold and White inks.

From left: Opened bottles of the Silver ink and 'Pen Cleaner' Solution.

Other than being non-toxic, the inks are also water-proof, acid-free and of archival quality.

The rich, vivid colors of these highly pigmented acrylic inks render them ideal for calligraphy, drawing, painting, stamping as well as airbrushing.

The inks are inter-mixable (when wet of course) - you may mix and blend different colors if you're feeling adventurous.

Notably though, I noticed that the inks take a long time to dry. There was a point when I had to wait for about 15-20 minutes for the ink to dry so that I can apply another layer of ink (of different color) over the first layer without the inks intermixing.

Below are some sample hand-letterings I wrote with these inks on Canson's Bristol Paper:

Written with the Black and Silver inks

Written with the Gold ink

Written with the White ink over colored paper (these inks are opaque)

Speedball also sells several other different colors of pigmented acrylic ink as well - if you will like to find out more, please check out my past review here.

Availability

You can get these inks at Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.co.jp