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Today I'm reviewing Diamine November Rain ink. Diamine November Rain is a Diamine Exclusive ink made specially for sale in Germany. I’ve seen it for sale on Fountainfeder, Papier & Stift and Seitz-Kreuznach websites as well as on Amazon. It comes in 30ml bottles and 80ml bottles. I only have a sample bottle, so I can’t post a picture of the 80ml glass bottle and box. This is a saturated dark green ink with red sheen. It doesn’t have quite as much sheen as the Organics Studio high sheen inks, but has more sheen than what you would call a “standard” ink. In my opinion, Diamine don’t have a current similar standard ink that is is very similar to November Rain, although Dark Forest is probably the closest. November Rain a blue leaning green. More green than Lamy Petrol and Organics Studio Henry D Thoreau Walden Pond. I would describe it as similar to a dark conifer green forest. The fact that it’s a saturated ink that has good sheen, without having too much sheen, comes with a few benefits: It’s a very nice green colour, whether you can always see the red sheen or not. It easily washes off of my hands with cold water and bar soap (definitely not like Organics Studio Nitrogen, Ralph Emerson, or Henry Thoreau) and it easily flushes out of my converters and pens just using water. It didn’t suffer from any hard starts or non-starts when I put the uncapped pen down to do swab tests, dry times and water resistance. I like that about these inks. It dried quite quickly on most reasonably absorbent papers and once dry it didn’t smudge or smear. I tested for this by rubbing repeatedly across my writing. I saw no green or red on my fingers, and no smudging on the page. I really enjoyed writing with it. With these high sheen inks showthrough and bleedthrough can be a problem. There was showthrough on several of the papers I wrote on, although I could still have written on the reverse of all them with no problem. The red sheen is usually more visible when using pens with wet flow and broader nibs. Flow Rate: Very good.Lubrication: Very good.Nib Dry-out: Not noticed.Start-up: Immediate.Saturation: Highly saturated ink.Shading Potential: Some shading with finer nibs or dry writing pens.Sheen: Good red sheen.Show-Through:Oxford 80gsm lined pad.Royal Recycled.Tomoe River 52gsm - Slight.Rhodia Bloc.Whitelines.Spread / Feathering / Woolly Line: Seen on a couple of papers with my wet B nib.Nib Creep / “Crud”: Not seen.Staining (pen): Not seen after several days in the pen - easy clean-up with water.Staining (hands): Easy clean-up with bar soap.Clogging: Not seen. Seems unlikely.Water resistance: Not sold as waterproof but has some water resistance.Availability: Exclusive to Germany and available from: Fountainfeder, Papier & Stift, Seitz-Kreuznach and Amazon. I found Fountainfeder offers the lowest price including shipping, especially when you buy two 80ml bottles.

Following my review for Pelikan Edelstein Aquamarine, this is my review of another newly released Pelikan ink from the 4001 range: Pelikan Dark Green. I find it a dark green with slight blue undertones. Certainly not a teal like Pelikan Edelstein Aquamarine. More like the colour of Pine tree needles. It reminded me of Montblanc White Forest as soon as I wrote with it, and sure enough it is very similar to that very nice but no longer available 'Seasons greetings' ink. So if you have a hankering for Montblanc White Forest, then Pelikan Dark Green will make a good substitute for it. I found this a slightly drier ink than the Pelikan Edelstein Aquamarine, and it dried on my thick, smooth paper in about half of the time. However, it still flowed well enough in my pens to look quite a bit darker when I used broader nibs. It shows some shading and is saturated. It stained my fingers for a while, and that tends to be the case with these dark green/blue inks. I forgot all about the water test so the ink was covered in water for about 20minutes. I can clearly see there are dark grey/black remains. So it has good water resistance. I like dark blue-greens like this, so it gets a thumbs up from me.

Today I'm reviewing the latest Pelikan Edelstein ink Aquamarine I must admit I thought it would be a lighter shade than it is. It's a well saturated blue-green teal ink. I found it quite wet because I could see each line of writing still glistening as I wrote the next line, and I found that it took longer to dry on my 100gsm paper than several other inks I've tried lately. I really like the colour though, and I found it beautifully smooth in the 3 pens that I filled with it. I had no problems with any dry out or hard starts while I left the caps off the pens so that I could do the swabs and comparisons. I am aware that it is a similar colour to Pilot Iroshizuku Ku-jaku, but I no longer have that ink. Instead I compared it with Pilot Iroshizuku Syo-ro, which is more green. It's water resistance is very good. I'm sure it will be a really popular colour like the previous Inks of the Year have been. Thanks to my OH for pressing the camera remote while I operated the piston of the pen.