Diamine Inkvent Calendar Day 11

 

Day 11 gives us an ink that rewards patience. It is called "Party Time," fitting in with the theme of festivity that gets oddly broken up by tempest and storm, or moderated by candle light and raspberry rose. It is a shimmer ink, though this may not be immediately apparent. 

In fact, the shimmer is only apparent once the bright fuschia ink has completely dried. When it did, it had a lovely, unusual shimmer that seems to be almost a pale lavender.

Tomorrow, I finish page 2 of my Invent ink swatches, which is shaping up to be quite a lovely page!

Diamine Inkvent Calendar Day 10

Day 10 gives us Peach Punch--an alliterative name for an orange that goes to peach and back again. While I know that the "punch" is more a beverage than a verb, my brain can't help borrowing a bit from the old "how about a nice Hawaiian Punch" commercials...

 

I realized at some point yesterday evening after browsing inks online for a few hours that the names of the 2019 Inkvent Inks were holiday, winter, and holiday-festivity related. So far, only Garland, Winter Spice, and Candle Light really speak to a holiday season, though Raspberry Rose does pick up one of the colors of Advent, and Seize the Night and Peach Punch both seem more or less related to festive drinking.

Less theme, more ink...

This ink is a standard, with no shimmer or sheen. It seems standard in more than these special properties: I didn't find it very wet; I don't think it was very dry. There doesn't seem to be much shading. 

It is a nice, orangey-peach ink, and my younger daughter loves it because orange is one of her colors.

Diamine Inkvent Calendar Day 9

Inkvent Day 9 was a very nice surprise! As I suspected, if my husband and I had traded days--with him taking evens and me odds instead of how we started, the other way around, I would still have opened the inks with special effects. Day 9's "Storm" proved that hypothesis correct, so I'm glad we decided to wait it out!

Storm is a shimmer ink in a beautiful shade of dark blue. I find it interesting that we have a "Storm" after having already had a "Tempest" on Day 4, and while I tried to paint clouds for Tempest, today I couldn't resist a Storm at sea.

The shimmer is quite dramatic on this one, and it shades a bit, though I think I went heavy on the ink.

My husband's swatch has more variation in tone than mine:

And if you don't remember why 6 was afraid of 7, it's because...

Diamine Inkvent Calendar Day 8

 

Day 8 is the first door I have opened that wasn't a sheen or shimmer ink, but a standard. It is "Raspberry Rose," and as odd as that flower-fruit combination is from a sensory perspective, it is actually a very accurate name for today's ink, which I would other wise describe as a... deep rose, or raspberry. Nicely done, Diamine!

Beyond the beauty of the color, I don't find much to note. It can range from very deep and dark to a medium hue--so perhaps from a deep raspberry to a medium rose color.

For this sample, I switched the fine nib from the Brause Blue Pumpkin, which I don't really like, to a Nikko Comic: G nib, which I suppose is a bit better. I'm not really well-versed in the calligraphy nibs, and I should really find an option that I like for testing how the ink will look in a pen, which is, after all, how I will use it most.

This is one that I would like to see in one of my pens, probably a Lamy All-Star. In the meantime, it seems appropriate for the third weekend of Advent, which is approaching.

Diamine Inkvent Calendar Day 7

Welcome to Inkvent Day 7! I was a little distracted this evening because after opening the box and doing the swatches, I played around a bit with one of the 2019 Inkvent inks, Holly. I was not aware of the Inkvent calendar in 2019 until we were actually in the season, but we have collected four of the special "Blue Edition" inks that came out of that calendar. Meanwhile, my husband got an order from Goulet pens that included eight free sample inks for his birthday, so he was sampling those.

Day 7 is called "Candle Light." 

Holding with the pattern, it is a standard ink.

I offered to my husband, who is opening the odd numbers, that we could switch days, but then perhaps Diamine would throw us a shimmer on the first odd numbered day I opened, and he would still end up with a standard!

Candle Light is more gold than yellow: a candle whose light truly does shine in the darkness rather than a little joyful flame, lit more for its cheer than to hold back the night.

It has, if not a sheen, a slight edge that is a deeper gold, or orangey-red.

I tried, with the paintbrush, to see if it would shade, but it seems to layer rather than shading. I am almost tempted to draw it out with water as if I were using watercolor paint rather than ink, but I don't think that would improve the effect.

I do, however, like the lighter rich yellow that I can draw forth with very little ink on a brush. That is my favorite shade of this ink.

Diamine Inkvent Calendar Day 6

 

Inkvent Day 3 is a bit of an enigma! The name is "Winter Spice," and it is a shimmering and sheening ink, which means that while you would be right to expect, say, brown, that is not the whole story!

It is, you see, different in different light. VERY different. And if you turn it one way...

...versus another:

It is a rich brown that sheens green with a blue shimmer, which means that sometimes, it looks quite teal. 

It makes one want to use a paintbrush to sketch spice cakes and molasses sugar cookies, though the latter have an unfortunate tendency to look like reindeer droppings and are best turned into logs. You might also be tempted to paint an old tree that has lost all of its leaves for the winter, or try your hand at a skritchy little fox.

It is not a wet ink, and would probably perform best in a broad-nibbed pen; my broad-nibbed pens for shimmer inks are TWSBI Eco. I think it would probably be very nice with a stub nib.

Diamine Inkvent Calendar Day 5

Inkvent Day 5 is a standard ink called "Harmony." It seems particularly well-suited to Advent!

While it starts out as a rather wet greyish-purple (that both of us managed to get on our fingers--a first for the Advent inks), it dries to what might be described as a medium-dark lavender.

It is a true standard ink, with no sheen that I can detect. It shades some, but not as much as the Ash. 

I'm not sure the pictures really capture what a nice smokey purple this is. Purple is my favorite color, and my husband remarked that if he were shopping for ink for me, he would not have picked this particular purple, since it didn't seem "purple" enough. It is, however, one I would pick for myself! 

In the meantime, I added some little brush pictures to embellish days 1 and 2: