Red Diamine Inkvent, part 1

I swatched the red Diamine Inkvent calendar.1 There’s room in the swatch book for the green and purple Inkvents, too, but 25 swatches is a good place to stop for now.

Potentially unpopular opinion: As much as I’ve enjoyed getting the Diamine Inkvent calendar as a gift for the last several years, I’m not sure anyone who discovers their existence today needs to think about getting more than one. None of the calendars have an individual theme, color range or character to them. I’d recommend looking at all swatches from the three calendars, deciding which ones you like the most, and getting the one that has the majority of them.2 

Here are days 1 through 8 of the Red Inkvent:

LEGEND:Red = color of Inkvent calendar. Number = Day of that calendar.Name of ink = Never strays far from a winter or holiday theme.Adjective(s) = Additional info on the side of the sample bottle.Chicken scratch = Some people do Q-Tip swatches, but I mostly write and rarely draw.

The new “background” is a Christmas present: a Girologio writing mat.3 

I used a dip pen very similar to this one. Dip pens, like other kinds of pens, can range in price and appearance. It’s nice to have at least one in your arsenal.4 Using a fountain pen’s nib as a dip pen can be annoying to clean but you can just dunk a dip pen in a cup of water and move on.

I know the swatches are pretty underwhelming in the photo. I used a magnifying app to get closer. Still had to crop the photos in the native iPhone app, though.

Some highlights:

Dark Diamine shimmer inks tend to be thicker in consistency than their lighter counterparts, and are easier to dip/take a little longer to dry. Tempest is a typical example of this.

The closeup doesn’t show this well, but Winter Spice is a brown ink. That makes the blue sparkle even more satisfying in person.

Something I’ve noticed in every Inkvent calendar: There’s at least one “Standard” color that’s much more interesting up close. You can see layered shades in the main photo with Candlelight. But when layered, Ash can also be several different, distinct shades. In my experience, that’s a little unusual for darker gray ink.

Some “shimmer and sheen” inks, like Day 2’s Garland, were underwhelming in real life also. But there are a couple of possible explanations:

1. Sometimes I forget to agitate the bottle first. Shimmer ALWAYS settles, and very quickly. I have yet to meet a shimmer ink from any brand that didn’t need a good shake not only in the bottle, but also in the pen itself once it’s loaded.

2. The paper. This swatch book is not an actual swatch book that you can buy from your friendly neighborhood pen dealer.5 It’s a stack of “word cards” I got at Daiso6. The paper is slightly nicer than ordinary notebook paper, but it’s not Rhodia or Tomoe River or anything else that works to show off inks. This was a deliberate choice on my part to see how hard the inks actually work, but it may not have been fair to Garland.

Part 2 coming soon,

E