It’s day 14 in the Invent calendar, and it’s time for one of my favourite door illustrations:

Day 14’s ink is Diamine Three Kings, a standard dark yellow ink. Yes, that’s not a mistake – there’s not a smidgen of sparkle in sight with this one, despite the ink’s shade and its name. I salute whomever had the restraint.

What Three Kings does well is shade. The colour reminds of aged gold, a yellow with a good hint of dark orange to it.

I drew a not very good sketch of a lion with Three Kings, and while I love the shading that it offers and it reminds me of yellow ochre (which I use a lot in my sketches) I don’t think that it’s the best shade for sketching. It won’t stand up to other colours, it isn’t waterproof so it won’t combine well with watercolours, and it’s a bit anaemic on its own. Maybe combined with other brown inks…

Diamine Three Kings is an interesting colour, mostly because it’s sort of a colour hybrid (like R&K’s Alt Goldrun in concept, if not in colour), and it isn’t a shimmer or chameleon ink. I don’t see a bottle of this ink in my future, but if you are looking for a yellow ochre ink, Three Kings may be the ink for you.

It’s day 13 of Diamine Inkvent, and I almost didn’t create this review because I had a late afternoon post cancer heart echocardiogram at the hospital and I was sure that I was in for at least a two hour wait. Thankfully my wait was much shorter (and even more thankfully my heart survived everything that cancer and chemo threw at it), so here’s today’s review.

Day 13’s ink is another chameleon one: Diamine Upon a Star. Let’s all pause and acknowledge that this is just a beautiful name for an ink. Upon a Star is a royal blue ink with green, purple, blue chameleon shimmer that makes me think of peacock tail feathers.

Diamine Upon a Star is a saturated royal blue with a good amount of the somewhat tiresome but well know red sheen. The sheen can easily overshadow the chameleon glitter, and so the effect can sadly pretty easily be lost.

I’m still watching Dinsey’s the Magic of Animal Kingdom (it’s very good, even if I’m not 100% in love with Josh Gad’s narrating style) and so I drew a macaw to test out this ink. I was using a Lamy Safari fine nibbed pen and the chameleon effect is almost entirely lost beneath the shimmer.

I have too many inks in this shade of blue to even consider Diamine Upon a Star, especially considering that its chameleon effect just looks like red sheening or disappears under the red sheening most of the time. It’s a nice ink to have a little sample of, but not one that I plan on purchasing in the future.

It’s time for day 11 in Diamine’s Inkvent calendar.

Day 11’s ink is Diamine Appletini. I’m not sure how much of a tie in that has to Christmas, but I guess a bright green ink is always welcome at this time of year.

Diamine Appletini is a bright grass green standard ink with some nice shading to it.

It’s not a chameleon ink, but Appletini’s colour really brought to mind chameleons and so I sketched one for testing purposes:

I used a Kaweco Sport iridescent medium nibbed fountain pen to test Diamine Appletini and got a good amount of shading with it. It’s not the most practical of colours, but is a bright and cheerful one, which make it nice to use during the cold and dark winter months.

Day 7 is upon us, with its candy cane door:

Day 7’s ink is Diamine Alpine, it’s a dark grey green with green shimmer in it, and it’s delightful.

The Col-o-Ring swab shows off some of the shading properties of this ink. It really reminds me of Diamine Umber, one of my favourite Diamine inks, with an additional pizzaz of sparkles.

Like Diamine Umber, Diamine Alpine is a fun ink to sketch with, and should work particularly well on cream coloured paper. Here is a sketch on tomoe river paper, where you can see the shading and a bit of the shimmer:

The shimmer here is subtle, which works well with this muted shade of green. It doesn’t overshadow the shading properties of this ink, but rather adds to it. The result is interesting and festive – a worthy addition to the Diamine Christmas ink lineup.

It’s time for door number 6:

Diamine Ghost is day 6’s ink. It’s a wonderfully shading bluish grey, a close kin to the phenomenal Diamine Earl Grey.

Ghost is on the light side of greys, although not light enough to be unreadable in this fine nibbed Diplomat Aero. It is probably not the best for cream coloured paper, but on white paper it works well enough:

Ghost really shines on Tomoe River paper, as its shading properties are really prominent here. I had a lot of fun sketching this baby ruru (morepork) on this 52g original Tomoe River paper notebook:

I love grey inks so I am definitely going to buy a bottle of this no – it’s a bluish grey shading ink, what’s not to love?

It’s time to see what’s behind door number 5:

Inkvent day 5 ink is Diamine Spiced Apple, a red chameleon ink.

Like Solar Storm, another chameleon ink from this year’s Inkvent, Spiced Apple is difficult to photograph.

Spiced Apple is a bright red ink with chameleon shimmer that makes it look golden brown from some angles, blue green or bright red from others. The left side of this apple sketch looks golden brown, which is why it came out darker in this photo.

I don’t normally use red inks, as I associate the colour with editing, not writing. However, the chameleon effect really does make this ink particularly appealing.