It’s Day 4 of the Diamine Inkvent calendar. What’s behind today’s door?
Day 4’s door
It’s Diamine Spruce – a saturated dark green that’s (unfortunately) scented.
Diamine Spruce bottle.
The ink is a dark viridian green with a red sheen and relatively little shading, as it is so saturated. It also showed a troubling tendency to stain pens, perhaps because it is so saturated or perhaps because of the pigments involved. It’s not a super sheening ink, which means that drying times are long but acceptable, but it will feather on even normally fountain pen friendly paper.
Diamine Spruce swab on a Col-o-Ring
Diamine Spruce is a very Christmas appropriate ink, and I’d have no issue with it if it wasn’t scented. Diamine doesn’t normally make scented inks and I don’t like scented inks, which means that this is not only the first scented Diamine ink that I own, it’s the first scented ink that I own. Did Diamine even make scented inks before this Inkvent calendar? I don’t like scented inks enough to even check.
Diamine Spruce on Tomoe river 52g paper
I filled a Lamy Safari with a medium nib with Diamine Spruce, and the air freshener smell it gives off is so unpleasant that I’ll probably dump the ink in the converter right after writing this review. It’s not an overpowering scent, but it is present, and I don’t like it. It reminds me of hospital toilets and car air-fresheners, and not in a good way. Definitely not an ink that I would ever buy or use.
What does day 3 of the 2022 Inkvent calendar bring?
Door 3
Something new and exciting: a chameleon ink:
Diamine Solar Storm
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?
Solar Storm swab on a Col-o-Ring
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.
Diamine Solar Storm on tomoe river 52g (original paper)
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.
Diamine Solar Storm compared with Diamine Stargazer from 2021’s Inkvent
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.
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:
Diamine Yule Log on Col-o-Ring
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:
Yule Log sketch on Tomoe River paper 52g
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.
It’s day 1 of Inkvent 2022, and it’s time to see what’s behind the first door (the illustration on the calendar is exactly the same as in previous years, just on a green background, instead of a blue or red one):
Door 1
It’s Diamine Bliss!
Diamine Bliss bottle
I filled a Pilot Metropolitan fine nibbed pen with it, and created this Col-O-Ring swab:
A nice and bright turquoise with some shading.
It’s definitely a cheerful and calming colour, and it has distinct summery vibes to it. To test it out I created a quick sketch of the beach and the Mediterranean on a Tomoe River 52g notebook (the original Tomoe River paper).
A blissful view.
I then wrote this quick review of The Expanse series using it. As you can see, despite this ink being labelled as “standard” it shades very well, even in a fine nibbed pen. It also remains readable throughout, which isn’t a given in turquoise inks. This was written on Tomoe River paper 68g (original tomoe river paper).
I highly recommend reading The Expanse. Yes, all nine novels. It’s worth it.
I like turquoise inks, and so I have a few swabs of them at hand (and one or two laying around that I haven’t swabbed yet). Diamine Bliss is very close to Sailor Bungubox June Bride Something Blue, and not far from Diamine Subzero (minus the shimmer). Not a particularly rare shade of ink, but a nice one nonetheless.
I recently returned from a three week trip to Orlando, Florida, which is why there have been no posts in a while now here. The trip was one that my brother and I planned in 2019, and was originally meant to take place in April 2020. Walt Disney World had a Star Wars themed running race weekend in April, and in those heady days of fast passes you could (and should) have booked things 6 months in advance. We had everything planned to the day and to the hour: hotels, restaurants, tours, parties, and rides.
And then there was Covid.
The world, and the parks, shutdown, the races were cancelled, and we went into lockdown.
The Disney World parks eventually reopened, and even started gradually to return to their former glory. In November 2021 the races returned to Disney, with a tearful group of runners standing on the starting line after missing an entire season of races.
I was in the last, and hardest, parts of my chemo treatment at the time.
When I finished treatments my brother insisted on re-booking our planned Disney World trip. We didn’t plan on including a race weekend in it at first, as I didn’t even know if I could run, let alone run 5k and 10k in the Florida heat. We selected a date mostly based on the hurricane season and when the parks would be less busy. Then we realised that it fell on the Halloween season, and potentially a race. After that we expanded the trip to include both the Halloween and the Christmas season, and the Wine and Dine 5k and 10k races. We’d be in the parks in their 50th anniversary. We’d take a few days to see Universal Studios. It was going to be expensive, but a once in a lifetime trip, one that was three years in the making.
EPCOT
It was. It was exhilarating, joyous and intense. We covered all the parks, ran in the races, swam with dolphins, petted a rhino, ate a lot of good food, went to a lot of parties, and had a ton of fun. We walked 25,000 steps a day on average, with some days reaching 35-39,000 steps. We also had a hurricane hit the parks, in a season that is supposed to be hurricane free. But that was also part of the experience.
Christmas Tree in Magic Kingdom
I returned home to jet lag and some family and personal health issues. My dad will need to have an aorta valve replacement surgery in the very near future, and my lungs are only up to 74% capacity. I’m seeing a lung specialist tomorrow, to see if there’s anything that can be done to improve their recovery.
I have the Diamine Inkvent 2022 green advent calendar, and I intend to use it. My original plan was to post reviews of each colour on each day, filling a fountain pen and writing and drawing with it, as I have done in the past. That is still my intention, but as I don’t know what the future will bring, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do that.
Diamine Inkvent Advent Calendar
This is the time of year when a lot of people feel a lot of things about their family. Whatever kind of family you have, please take the time to consider that they may not always be there, and you may not always be here for each other. Life has a tendency to be shorter than you planned, and it’s oftentimes more dicey. Try to be gentle, kind, open, and understanding if you can. Most people go through a certain amount of trauma in their lives, and that leaves scars, usually of the kind you can’t see. Be gentle with each other. We are all there is in the end.
There’s a waterlily pool near where I work, and it would be so easy to paint them with watercolours and so difficult to sketch them in pen and ink, so of course I sketched them in pen and ink. It is inktober after all.
This is a quick sketch of our family friend Joe during our weekly zoom meeting with him. Joe is one of the smartest, funniest and kindest people I know, he’s 97 years old, and he’s been a family friend since I can remember myself. Do you have a similar inspiration in your life?
This was sketched using a Platinum Plaisir fountain pen on an A4 Midori MD Cotton notebook.
As I was running a few days ago I saw some workers packing up the plastics in the sea exhibit and I stopped to take a picture of them as they tried to figure out how to fit all the statues into their truck. I sketched this purposely very loosely and very quickly, to see if I could capture a complex scene without getting overly absorbed in the detail. It’s a good exercise to try out, and one that I intend to do more of in the future.
TWSBI ECO fine with J. Herbin Emarald of Chivor on an A4 Midori MD Cotton notebook.
A friend was at a local vintage Indian motorcycle meeting and she took a photo of a 1948 Indian chief, so this is today’s sketch, directly in pen and ink. 3776 Plantinum UEF fountain pen with Sailor Epinard ink on an A4 Midori MD Cotton notebook.
My memories of autumn in Regina Saskatchewan are what inspired this small series, and so I thought that it would be fitting to draw a small panorama of autumn leaves in Regina. Drawn with various brush pens and Staedtler markers on an A4 Midori MD Cotton notebook.
You can see the full page here. I kind of like the resulting effect:
Writing at Large 