Diamine Inkvent 2023, Closing Thoughts

Diamine Inkvent 2023 is a wrap, and so is Christmas! I hope you, your friends, and family had a relaxing, happy time together. And if you had challenging times this holiday season, I wish you a better, happier, more fulfilling time to come.

It’s a dreary day out today, so not much sunshine to help show off the shimmer of these inks on watercolor paper

This is only my second year playing with the inks in Diamine Inkvent, but it’s already become a really fun tradition. Besides the individual creative time I had, looking forward to a fun ink surprise every day for almost all of December, swatching it, and posting on my blog, I liked the community aspect of it because many people were opening up the same inks each day (some do it in advance, but still), posted their impressions, and maybe a fun piece of art or quote to go with them. The act of doing a similar thing along with so many people at the same time was a wholesome activity and a cool lead up to Christmas festivities for me.

Other people did their version of an Inkvent, picking their own mystery inks to highlight and play with, which is great! You don’t have to get the Diamine set to play along, and I’m toying with the idea of doing something like that next year (though I’ll probably also get the Diamine set anyway).

Some Initial Ragrets

At the beginning of Inkvent, I was somewhat regretting buying the set, because so many inks from the first week were either disappointing or just meh. I only really liked Early Dusk from day 3, and had mixed feelings about Cashmere Rose and Masquerade from days 2 and 4, respectively. But by day 8, things picked up and the meh or disappointing inks were fewer and farther between, phew.

My Top Inks

This recap image shows the top 11 inks that I instantly liked, and probably put into a pen right away (not all of them, though), and then 7 runners up of varying degrees.

The top 11 are loosely arranged in rainbow order, with the browns subbing in for yellow in ROY G BIV.

Red

For those top 11, the red, browns, and greens are surprise likes. I couldn’t find red inks for quite a while that didn’t gross me out, or were simply appealing (the tide turned with this batch of “Christmas reds”), so it was a nice surprise that Diamine made another red I could use (I don’t mind Red Dragon, which happens to be one of the first bottled inks I ever bought when I started collecting fountain pens).

Browns and Greens

The browns and greens were a big turnaround for me, since neither of those colors regularly make my preferred list of shades. I did get a couple greenish inks (either purchased or received ink samples) before Inkvent that sort of primed me to consider green inks more, so that was likely a factor.

Weeping Willow is an intriguing multi-shader. I hope Diamine delves into more multi-shaders in the near future. Walnut is a dark brown that just came out of left field for me. I like it a lot in my Lamy Lx Marron, especially with the cursive nib I just bought and plan to blog about soon. Cinnabun was another surprise since I haven’t been big on the scented inks. I still don’t like its chemical scent, and its tendency to feather requires careful selection of a nib to rein that in, but the color appeals to me for some reason.

Merry & Bright instantly reminded me of Loki, even though the green is brighter than his normal green suit. Sugar Snap’s dusky yellow-green with silver shimmer just shouts spring to me. I look forward to using it then.

Blues and Purples

For anyone who knows me, it’s a given that I would like several of the blues and purples in the set. As I said before, Early Dusk was the first ink I came across that matched my preferences, despite being a “boring” standard ink. Blizzard’s blue-gray base appealed to me a tiny bit more than Glacier.

Jacaranda was the first bright purple that followed the dismal first week, so it was doubly appreciated. Rainbows End (argh, lack of apostrophe) was both violet and had a cool magenta shimmer that I liked in last year’s Deck the Halls. Tranquility’s violet-rose base, plus chameleon shimmer was another instant “fill a pen now” ink (I am surprised I did not ink a pen with Rainbows End…yet).

The Runners Up

Fireside Snug, Glacier, and Lavender Frost are inks I am partial to, but just didn’t make the top, instant likes. Cashmere Rose, Masquerade, Moon Beam, and I guess Nightfall are ones that I’m very on the fence about. They look kind of nice in swatches, but I’m not sure I’d really want to write in my journal with them, especially the dark, almost black inks.

However, as you may know from reading my previous posts about inks, my tastes change, sometimes wildly, so I may be singing these inks’ (and some of the others that didn’t even make it to the recap) praises later.

Quick Analysis

So, out of the 25 inks, 18 were in the like column (of varying degrees), not a bad percentage. I think this might be higher than last year’s Inkvent, but I’d have to go back and really think about that set, given my current preferences. I had fun revisiting Christmas TV episodes and movies to harvest quotes for this project. I’ll have to think of a different theme to use for next year.

Inkvent Tree

One last thing: I was pleasantly surprised to see the response to the 3D-printed Inkvent tree that my husband designed for my use. Enough people were interested that he ended up putting the print files online for a reasonable price and got a few sales! He already has some thoughts about redesigning the Inkvent tree for next year, so stay tuned next holiday season. I also have given him some fountain pen accessory ideas to design and 3D print, so those may also show up on his page in the near future.

What did you think of this year’s Inkvent inks? Did you do your own Inkvent, or do you plan to next year? Let’s chat on Mastodon. 🙂