Taccia - Uguisu

It has been a couple of months since I reviewed an ink – work and other commitments left no time.  Todays ink is Uguisu from Taccia. An ink I have been using  a lot the last few days.  
Taccia inks are made in Japan the pens come from the USA.

Uguisu is the name for the Japanese bush Warbler.  The Japanes Bush Warbler is a singing bird frequently heard throughout Japan but not so frequently seen.  The song is said to herald Spring.  So distinctive is the song and with the birds propensity to sing it has led to them being kept as caged birds.   In order to encourage them to sing the cages are covered and a small amount of subdued lighting is let into the cage.   Im not a great fan of caged birds of any sort.
This is a green ink, the majority of pictures online of the bush warbler suggest it is brown.  Though the odd green picture can be found.

Taccia inks come in a squat 40ml bottles which are very reminiscent of the old Sailor bottles.  The box is quite pretty and the colour on it is a very fair representation of the ink colour within
In New Zealand Pen Classics sell the ink for NZ$24.99, which works out at about 62cents/ml so these are not particularly cheap inks.  In the USA they are about US$12 a bottle or about 30cents/ml. 

​
Starting with chromatography it is quite bright with a mixture of turquoise and green, even a little yellow thrown in.

On Tomoe it is a nice but Im going to say dullish green and definitely an olive green on col-o-ring

I used a Tailored Pen Company pen with a medium nib for the writing.  The papers are cheap, Rhodia and Tomoe.  This is the original Tomoe paper, going forwards I need to get some of the new paper.
Starting with copy weight paper.  It dried quite quickly to a darker green.  Unfortunately it is too wet for cheap paper there was a lot of show through which resulted in some bleeding to the next page.

On Rhodia I thought it was going to be quite wet but it dried surprisingly quickly, some shading started to appear but it still feathered though very slight.

Lastly Tomoe (cream paper) and as expected very sow drying, I could still smudge the ink at 60 seconds.  It was  a darker green here but the shading was more obvious.

I like this ink because I am sucker for these shades of green.  Having said I have so many green inks that this doesn’t have enough of a ‘wow’ factor for me to pay for a bottle at the price in NZ, if I was in the US then maybe.  I’ll just have to wait until I can buy aa sample. It behaved impeccably and had some nice shading though dry time is a little too long on Tomoe.  I thought it looked best on Rhodia.
The closest dupe I have is Pilot Iroshuizuku – Chiku-rin.  Other similar inks are Robert Oster Vede de Rio and Sailors Waka-Uguisu

In summary 
Saturation – high
Shading – some, not great
Sheen – no
Shimmer – no
Flow – good
Nib dry-out - none
Nib creep - none
Start-up – ok
Feathering – yes, on cheap paper and slightly even on Rhodia
Drying – good except Tomoe
Cleaning - good
Water resistance – Not said to be waterproof but after being held under a tap the green washed out immediately and as you can see in the photo the yellow soon followed leaving a reasonable amount of turquoise behind