Ink Review: New Ink Colour! Diamine Oxford Blue

[Chrissy]

How would you rank this group of blues in terms of drying times and smearing? (Goulet's video review of Majestic Blue says it dries too slowly and smears like crazy.)

 

That will depend on the pen and the paper. Many inks will take a long time to dry if you use a wet pen on very smooth paper.

 

Diamine Majestic Blue has been no worse than any other in my own experience. I tend to use F or M nibs and many different papers

[inkstainedruth]

Somehow I missed this thread originally.

Oxford Blue is rapidly becoming one of my favorite blues (edging out Diamine Denim, because of the red sheen).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[taimdala]

_{Interesting. Along one short stretch of highway in North Carolina, two universities share a similar blue color dichotomy. At one end of US 15-501, in Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina's team color is a light sky blue. At the other end of 15-501 in Durham, 20 minutes away, Duke University's team color is dark blue.}

 

Coming to the party late, as usual (!), but yes, I can attest to Bobje's comment on these two collegiate colors. I rather pefer the darker color over the lighter, myself.

[taimdala]

Here's a cut-together scan of my swabs for those three Diamine blues. Majestic is nice but I wouldn't call it dark. Maintenance isn't _that_ bad. Blue Velvet is, to me, indistinguishable from either Monteverde Horizon Blue and the discontinued Penman Sapphire. It's my favorite of the bunch but I think of it as the brightest blue this side of Bay State, not a dark blue. Try out the Goulet and Anderson ink tools. There are plenty of inks near these colors that I think you'd like. Then try some samples. Anderson Pens has 3mL vs Goulet 2mL if that matters. Diamine 30mL bottles from the UK website are also pretty darn cheap: 5x 30mL shipped to the USA for about $21 (delete the 5mL sample from the basket or shipping doubles).

 

http://i.imgur.com/9ufd8ya.jpg

 

And here's Goulet and Anderson's take:

 

http://i.imgur.com/aPloU08.jpg

 

 

I wish I could tell which company's swatches were more accurate: Anderson Pens's swatches look a whole value step darker than Goulet Pens's swatches--especially the Oxford Blue example. And though I was able to attend the Triangle Pen Show this past weekend and visited Anderson Pens' table to flip through their rather thorough swatch books, I wasn't able to compare their examples with Goulet Pens's. And fo course, I didn't have any swatched out from my own stash. It's a lost opportunity to answer that question.

 

Sigh.

 

To be sure, it was my first encounter with swatch books (a fabulous idea, I love it) AND pen shows, and I count myself lucky that I didn't lose my shirt due to all the shiny packed in the dealers room. NEXT YEAR I'll come better prepared! I'll bring my own swatches and do the naked eye comparisons myself.

[radellaf]

It was a fun show. I got out with one Franklin Christoph prototype, a bottle of Califolio Ohlanga from vanness, and a purple preppy for my sweetie from the Andersons (woulda got some Noodler's but they hardly had any). Oh, and something from Nock Co that holds a 3x5 notebook and one not-too-well-secured pen but is pretty teal & purple.

 

The Andersons swatch book is pretty hard to argue with, but their web swatches are IMHO on the dark side. For my use, even the Goulet swatches are a bit dark. I guess if you use a BB German nib, they might be spot on. I use a Japanese fine or maybe a medium and cringe when podcasts talk about a pen or ink being "wet" as if that's a good thing.

 

Given the price of 30mL Diamine from the UK website, I don't worry too much before ordering. At the normal USA $7.50 I'd give it some pause. It's the $30 inks (Colorverse, Faber C, Caran D) where I know I'm only going to get a few that I really want to see it in person first. Or sample it, but apart from last year's R Oster samples or the previous year's sprinkling of Diamines to compare against Chesterfield, I tend to go whole-bottle with ink. Oster is OK direct from Australia, but their shipping is a bit more than Diamine's 5 euro for 5 bottles. Gotta pick which brands I'm going to collect, and which I'll just dip a toe in. I _really_ love Diamine for having incredible colors, no frills, good (direct) prices, and excellent ink behaviour in all but a few of the colors.