Ink Swatch Wednesday: Shimmer Inks - 2 Inks in One!

In the vein of using what you have, I invite you to explore your shimmer inks by...not including the shimmer the next time you fill a pen. 😀 Let me explain: you can change up your shimmer ink's look by not shaking the bottle before you fill. The use of a syringe, eyedropper, or pipette helps a lot in this regard.

I found out that depending on the shimmer color and/or effect, the base ink color may look pretty different compared to when the shimmer isn't present. This could be because the shimmer has a chameleon effect, or it's a major contrasting color to the base ink color, or maybe there's so much shimmer that it effectively drowns out the base, for example. You could also be missing out on other aspects of the ink, like sheen or shading, because the shimmer is overtaking everything else.

Let me use last year's Diamine Inkvent inks as an example: I swatched each one with and without shaking the bottle so that I could see what the base ink color looks like. Of course you won't always get a completely shimmer-free ink if you don't shake the bottle, but I think the shimmer is negligible enough to consider it "non-shimmer". Also, keep in mind that the shimmer effect is not going appear as strongly in these scans as they would be when you're looking at the swatches at an angle in the right lighting, so the differences won't look as stark, but you'll get the idea.

Lavender Frost with the shimmer looks like what you'd expect from the name. But as you can see in the "non-shimmer" swatch, the base ink looks a little darker without all the strong silvery shimmer over top. It might even be more legible that way.

Raise a Glass is a dark purple ink with gold (or gold-green?) sheen, and green shimmer.

Is it just me, or could Raise a Glass without shimmer be a lookalike of the original Lamy Dark Lilac? Without the shimmer, the golden sheen is more noticeable.

There are some people who aren't huge shimmer ink fans, so they weren't entirely happy with how many shimmers were included in last year's Inkvent. But using the inks without shaking the bottle might be a good alternative for those in that boat. It could mean the difference between having an ink gathering dust (or giving it away/selling it), and being able to enjoy it in a different form.

Also, while I personally really like shimmer inks, right now I am not in the mood to use them. I'm in more of a chromoshader and regular shading ink mood. My batch of currently inked pens has no shimmer inks, which is an interesting change for me, as I usually have at least one or two shimmer inks in a currently-inked batch. Revisiting some of these Inkvent inks for this post has me wanting to try out their non-shimmer versions in a pen.

I hope you go back into your collection and explore your shimmer inks without their shimmer. Maybe this can help you get more use out of what you have, and give some lesser-used shimmer inks a new lease on life.

And because I ended up scanning all the Inkvent shimmer inks and their non-shimmer counterparts, I'll show them below for your reference (minus the 2 inks already shown above).