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I fell in love Coral Sea ink after getting a small sample to try, but seeing that I live in the U.S. and Coral Sea is an "Australian Exclusive" the cost just for S&H is just way too high for me to buy it.
It figures I'd fall for an ink that would cost me @ $60+ for 3 oz, including initial cost and shipping, just no way I could afford that and even if I could that's pretty hefty price to justify for just a 3 oz bottle of ink!

So what to do, when you find an ink you love and cannot afford to buy???
Well, try "cloning" it of course!
I've done a fair share of ink blending/mixing, usually getting it spot-on with little effort.
I'll admit that this one was the most difficult recipe to make and to to re-create out of all of the others combined.
Usually I can look at an ink, see in my minds' eye what ratios of what will probably work, but not Coral Sea!
It took me probably 2 weeks to get this one right, several different inks & ratios too, logging every step as I went.
It took me 5 different inks to make this work, not only the color but the "bulletproof" properties of original Coral Sea were tried being duplicated.
Now that I've gotten it "just right", I use this ink every day on my Rotring "28 LE, but seeing how many inks it took and just how expensive a couple were this will never be done again!




I get many compliments on this ink from those I send letters to when using it.
The typical remarks are "I like it! It's not quite blue, not black, not green, but a mixture of all three!" and that's pretty close.
What was toughest was getting the color/contrast/shading just right, needed to use not one but 3 different blue inks to get a match to Coral Sea.
If I ever had Nathan Tardiff make an ink for a forum [or for me], I'd ask him to make something like Coral Sea with all the permanence and color of the original, tossing in the UV reactivity changes I see using Hunter Green under a UV light source [Hunter Green Eternal turns a nice orange/yellow/red color from green when viewed under a good black light source, great for fraud protection!].

So there ya have it, my most complex and most expensive ink recipe ever produced.
I'll post some of my more "reasonable" blends at a later time, just thought this one took "post-priority" seeing how much time and effort it took me to produce.
Regardless of time and cost, I think I've pretty much nailed this one, just too bad once I run out of what I've made I'm not likely to ever make it again.
It's one thing to take two inks and make a new color, totally different story when 5 inks are needed to make just one but it sure does look and work well and passes extreme wash test right down to being 100% bleach-proof!