The first impression is of a very large sticky note pad and one feels encouraged to jump in and take risks. It is, as Endless claims, “less intimidating than a large notebook and way friendlier”. This is a glue-bound notepad which uses Regalia Paper, Endless’s in-house replacement for Tomoe River paper. The dot grid is printed on the face-up side only. Apart from the Endless logo the back of the sheet is blank. The pad is mounted on rigid card which removes the need for a clipboard. I took the opportunity to test it with the 2022 Diamine Inkvent Calendar inks. I did a little homework first which was just as well because the general consensus is that Regalia, like other soft papers, absorbs fingerprint and hand oils which can repel certain inks. This was certainly the case with Diamine. So, before letting your creativity flow, put a blank sheet of scrap paper under your writing hand. My tests included a swab, a fine fountain pen nib, a broad glass dip pen, and an italic Mitchell’s witch pen. The colours were consistently good, sheen and shading excellent. It has a very pleasant writing surface, except with fine calligraphy dip pens which, irritatingly, collected paper fibres. The Mitchell witch pen, on the other hand, produced clear, sharp strokes, unimpeded. There is very little to criticise – just that most of the inks took a long time to dry and the really heavy swabs bled through (but didn’t mark the sheet below). Inks feathered if the nib needed to be pressed into the paper, some more than others. (Inkvent numbers 2, 11, 21 and 23 were particularly bad, so I put this down to the ink rather than the paper). I love this paper – it was consistently excellent for fountain pen nibs, broad calligraphy nibs, and light brushwork and has enough texture to show off graphite and colour pencil lead. I do hope they will be making their unlined pad available – that will be really versatile.
