Pennonia - Vattacukor

Pennonia - Vattacukor - Ink drop

This is Pennonia’s Vattacukor, a beautiful ink from an interesting, exciting maker. In November of 2020, Pennonia began phasing out of pen retail, and have been focusing their energy on their inks and shimmer mixtures ever since. The name Vattacukor refers to cotton candy in English. Máté, Pennonia’s owner, says the name comes from his childhood. Watching the Cartoon Network, he was shocked to see pink cotton candy, as they were always white locally.

Visually, this is a highly saturated, pink-red. Interestingly, I don’t see the base color as a real match, for what I think of as cotton candy pink, but it’s nice. Written strokes are a much richer pink-red. However, this is a moderate shading ink, and light areas fade into what I would call a traditional cotton candy or bubble gum pink. Dark areas are slightly more saturated than the base. The splatter shows an interesting burnt orange sheen edging to areas of pooling. It’s far less prominent on strokes, but there are subtle hints on premium papers.

Pennonia - Vattacukor - Ink swatch card

As a writing ink, it was very nice on premiums papers. Strokes were clean and sharp, although slightly less so on Apica compared to the others. Shading was also weakest on Apica, but wasn’t really aggressive on any. Sheen was strongest on Kokuyo. There wasn’t a well-developed halo, but strokes were stronger on Kokuyo and Apica. Drying times were 15-25 seconds. It did pretty well on office copy. Strokes suffered from slight feathering, but there was some nice shading, and drying was 5 seconds.

This is a pretty ink, and I recommend it for premium papers. I’d love to see more shading in writing, but I suspect this would be very nice for brush and water projects.