Ink Swatch Wednesday: Diamine Inkvent Days 1-4

Well, hello! We're already a few days into Inkvent season, and no posts from me yet? Weird. Well, on the first day, I was really excited to start swatching, but I also wasn't feeling so great, so I didn't go through the whole rigamarole of scanning swatches and posting thoughts on the blog. I also wasn't sure what I would do beyond swatching the inks, as last year I wrote out Christmas-related quotes from TV shows and movies.

This year I'm going to keep it simple, not least because I actually have 2 Inkvents going on at the same time – the one from Diamine, and an unofficial Pen Addict Slack group Inkvent (IYKYK, and if you don't, ask me for more details! 😆).

Anyway, enough rambling. Here are the scans for Diamine Inkvent 2024, days 1 through 4:

Initial Thoughts

Baltic Breeze is a nice purple-y blue with bronze shimmer, but when writing out its name on the swatch card, the shimmer was not consistently distributed. The base color on its own appeared a bit too light at times. Perhaps in a good broadish-medium or broad nib the shimmer and base color will look better.

I am not a fan (currently) of Wilted Rose. It definitely looks like the color of a wilted pink rose, but that's not a color I enjoy. As always, though, I keep my mind open, as colors that I used to dislike or not understand the appeal of have ways of changing my mind for me (I'm looking at all of you, brown inks!).

Noble Fir's bright green reminds me of last year's Inkvent ink, Merry & Bright (which for whatever reason makes me think of Marvel Loki's costume), but it has a regular amount of champagne shimmer, instead of a metric ton of silver shimmer in the Star Bright ink Noble Fir. ✨ This kind of bright green is not usually my thing, but...open mind. 🧘‍♀️

My favorite of the bunch is Forest Gateau, which is a scented ink smelling of cherries, like maraschino cherries. I saw the name of the ink which automatically got me thinking about black forest cake. I'm not generally a cherries person, but I like black forest cake. And the scent of the ink, while chemical-y, does remind me of the kind of black forest cake I've had before. I also like the cherry-chocolate shade of the ink which really rounds out the whole theme they were going for. I actually didn't realize at first that it was a scented ink, but when I was swatching it, I started to smell cherries. 😅

Making a one-pager

Besides doing my regular ink library swatches, I decided to make a one-page spread for all of the inks on A4 Tomoe River paper.

I got this idea from Chris Saenz, who made a similar layout in her ink journal so that she could see all of the inks together at the end, which I really liked. It was kind of annoying to draw out this layout by hand with a ruler and pencil, but it worked out fine. Filling in a rectangle with a ruling pen is challenging, as I'm normally pretty free-form with my ink library swatches. Even though my rectangles aren't neatly filled in, I like that I'll have all colors visible on one page for reference. Now that I think about it, I'm tempted to do this for the previous two years of Inkvent inks that I have! I don't know where I'll put the A4 pages, but it'll be nice to have such a reference.

I know this is fairly barebones compared to previous Ink Swatch Wednesday posts, but I'll go back for certain Inkvent inks and write up better impressions and comparisons later.

What do you all think about days 1 through 4 so far? Did you also buy the Inkvent set, did you get Colorverse's Colorvent set, or did you make your own Ink Advent set?

I am somewhat sad I didn't get the Colorvent set, too, but a) it's more expensive than Diamine's, and b) my ink library is already getting out of control. 😅🫣 I watched a video showing off all of the inks since I wasn't going to buy the set myself, and there are a few brown and odd-colored inks that I wish I could get separately. But apparently they're only going to make full bottles of the top 3 inks voted by those who bought the sets (or whoever can get their hands on the QR code to vote!). Hopefully they change their mind on that in the future!