It’s day 10 of Inkvent, and interesting inks are upon us…

Day 10’s ink is Diamine Dusted Truffle a shimmer ink of an indescribable shade of on the cusp between light brown and grey.

I took a photo of the swab on an angle to try and show the colour of this ink. It’s a dusty golden brown in some angles, it has a greenish tinge in others, it’s very unique and chimeric.

You can see the more greyish tendencies of this ink in this quick truffle sketch. I don’t know if dusted truffle is the best name for this ink, but it certainly has a dustiness about it. It shades well, and there’s a silver shimmer to it, where you’d normally expect a golden one. Perhaps that gives it some of its unique shading.

Will I buy a full bottle of this ink? Maybe. It’s certainly high on my list, as I have nothing remotely like it in my ink selection, and it is an intriguing colour. I can’t stop staring at it trying to define what it is and failing. What a wonderful addition to Diamine’s ink lineup.

It’s day 8 of the Inkvent calendar already, and things are about to get bright and cheery…

Inkvent day 8’s ink is the fantastically name Diamine Jingle Berry. You really can’t get better than that for a Christmas themed ink name.

Jingle Berry is a rich fuchsia pink ink that’s labelled as a standard ink but has a good amount of outlining and some shading. It’s also called Jingle Berry, which automatically makes it the bestest of inks. I don’t make up the rules, I just follow them 😉

Diamine Jingle Berry is bound to make you smile: it’s the combination of the wonderful name with a truly joyful colour. It’s a dark pink, which means that it’s going to be legible on both white and cream papers, if legibility is what you are looking for in this ink (hint: you aren’t. You just want to have fun).

Once I saw what today’s ink was, I broke out my brand new and ridiculously pink and glittery (with some grey to tone it down) Franklin Christoph Model 03 Iterium Sedona Spa fountain pen, with the Nagahara fine cursive italic nib and embraced the delightful joy that is this ink. I’m glad that Diamine showed some restraint and didn’t try to glitterify this ink, as the result would have been too over the top and somehow also a bit banal. As it is they created an ink that I am tempted to add to my collection, even though I’m not normally a fan of pink inks.

What does day 3 of the 2022 Inkvent calendar bring?

Something new and exciting: a chameleon ink:

Day 3’s ink is Diamine Solar Storm, a dark purple chameleon ink. What is a chameleon ink, you may ask? I did too. When I saw the label on the bottle I thought that there must be some new ink trend that started when I was abroad and I missed it. Was that the new name for the hue shifting inks that Sailor popularised?

No it was not. A quick internet search revealed that chameleon inks were a new kind of shimmer ink from Diamine, first offered in the Inkvent 2022 calendar. What is special about them is that the mica in them is very fine, and so the shimmer shifts colour as you tilt the page and view your writing from different angles.

Very cool and impossible to photograph (you’ll perhaps get a feel for the effect in a video review). There are angles where you can barely see the shimmer, and others where it is dazzling, angles where it’s golden green and others where it’s silvery. The ink itself is a wonderfully dark, dusky and rich bluish-purple with a good amount of shading. Even without the chameleon effect it would have been lovely.

Comparing Solar Storm with last year’s Stargazer, there’s something more subtle about the chameleon effect that makes it more appealing to me than the shimmering and sheening Stargazer. It may be the newness bias, and it may be that I’ve grown tired of blue inks with lots of red sheen, but if chameleon inks are the next big thing, I’m not against them. Solar Storm is a fantastic ink, with a very peculiar name choice for a Christmas themed calendar. However, if it will clean out well out of my Pilot Metropolitan cursive medium fountain pen, then it is definitely going on the shopping list for a full bottle.

What’s behind door number 2?

A very festively named ink:

Day 2’s ink is Diamine Yule Log, a brown shimmer ink. There’s a lot of coppery shimmer in this ink, and a good amount of shading. I filled a Lamy Studio fine nibbed fountain pen with this ink, and all the writing samples here are done with that:

Yule Log is a sketcher’s ink in terms of hue: if it didn’t have shimmer to it, I could see myself sketching landscapes with it. You can see how close it is in shade and shading to De Atramentis Urban Sienna, which is an excellent sketching ink. Yule Log tends a bit more to yellow and Urban Sienna tends a bit more to red, but they both look like classic inks for pen and ink sketching.

The coppery shimmer does add interest to Diamine Yule Log and it makes it more celebratory without being so much shimmer that you lose the character of the ink. It still shades beautifully, and has a warm richness to it even without the sparkles:

I love that this ink is part of the Inkvent calendar, but I’m not so sure where it lives once Inkvent is over. Yule Log is dark enough to use in serious settings, but then it’s a shimmer ink, so maybe not something you want your colleagues to see you write meeting notes with. It isn’t festive enough to be your ink of choice for Christmas cards, and I’m not sure it has a place over any other ink for any other purpose. I’m sure that it’s going to be someone’s favourite ink somewhere, it’s just that I don’t think many people will be rushing off to buy a full bottle of it.