Diamine Marine Ink Review

(Jeff Abbott is a regular contributor at The Pen Addict. You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution and Twitter.)

For the past few months, I've been trying to introduce more green into my fountain pen ink rotation. I wouldn't say I'm going all green all the time, but I am trying to include more green at a slow pace during these cold months. The latest ink I've been trying was supposed to be in this green genre, but it turned out to be a little more blue than I anticipated! Despite that error on my side, Diamine Marine is still a gorgeous blue-green ink that pops off the page.

Before getting into all the specifics of this color, it's fair to point out that this, like all other Diamine inks I've used, is extremely well-behaved and easy to use. The color is bright and accurate to their marketing swatches, and the price is really hard to beat. There's a reason I have so many Diamine inks in my collection at this point: they just work so well.

Marine is primarily a green ink, but it has a heavy blue undertone that you can't ignore. Diamine classifies this as a turquoise ink, but I'm not sure I agree. Any color in the realm of turquoise, teal, aquamarine, blue-green, green-blue, or other popular mixtures are highly subjective when it comes to naming and identifying the colors. To me, Marine looks more teal, but there are certain natural turquoise colors in nature that look just like Marine as well. It's a spectrum, and that just means there isn't one right answer! In this case, just know that Marine is a green-blue color.

Questions of exact color aside, it's a gorgeous ink. I've really been enjoying using it because it makes me think of green (which is always a happy color to me), water, and also mint. The green is just light enough to bring out some mint comparisons, and the blue just adds a bit of depth to an otherwise flat color.

It's this additional depth of color that contributes to the minimal shading that this ink exhibits. Without the blue undertones, there wouldn't be much shading. Lucky for us, there's a good amount of color variation between light and dark strokes. This is more pronounced with larger nibs, but you can still see a good amount of variation with small or dry nibs.

One area that really surprised me with this ink is the dry time. I was anticipating something in the 15-second range, but I was really astonished when I discovered this ink was drying in the 5-10 second range depending on how wide/wet the nib stroke was. I'm still fairly shocked and impressed by this. It's hard to find any inks that dry that fast, let alone one with so much color saturation. If you're looking for a fast-drying ink and don't mine that it's a green-blue, this is a great place to start.

Like a lot of Diamine inks, you have several options regarding purchasing. With Marine, you can go for cartridges (box of 18), a 30ml bottle (my personal favorite), or an 80ml bottle.

(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

Scribo Verde Mediterraneo Ink: A Review

(Susan M. Pigott is a fountain pen collector, pen and paperholic, photographer, and professor. You can find more from Susan on her blog Scribalishess.)

Scribo ink arrives in a gorgeous, cloth-covered box. The box is substantial because the ink bottle is made of thick glass. Filled with ink it weighs a whopping 441 grams/15.5 ounces.

Verde Mediterraneo is a deep teal green with shading and a good amount of red/burgundy sheen. On my Col-o-dex card, you can see the various shades of the ink in the swab, the shading properties in the writing and swirl, and the sheen in the splats.

I tested the ink on white Rhodia dot-grid paper. It writes smoothly and demonstrates shading in all nib sizes. Although the ink dried super fast, it didn't seem dry when I wrote with it. In fact, it flowed quite nicely and is well saturated. It isn't waterproof.

Chromatography reveals a bit of pale yellow and ochre, turquoise and blue.

On MD Cotton Paper with my Handwritmic ruling pen you can see shading and sheen, especially where the ink pooled.

For a lengthier writing test, I used an MD Notebook Journal and my TWSBI Prussian Blue fitted with a Mark Bacas Predator nib. The ink was wet and flowed well. You can even see a bit of the red sheen.

I also drew a design modeled after a pattern by @mgemart_ on Instagram. This was done in my Galen Leather Tomoe River Journal. Again, the ink worked well on the paper, although you can see a difference between the left and right sides. The left side is more saturated (presumably because I had just inked the pen). The right side was completed the following day and is much lighter.

Scribo Verde Mediterraneo is an excellent dark teal ink. It reminds me most of Sailor Yama Dori, but the Scribo ink is much greener.

You can purchase this ink from Goldspot Pens ($39.00 for 90ml), although it is currently sold out. I would suggest trying a sample first just to make sure you like the color, since $39.00 is quite an investment. I suspect that price is partly due to the fancy glass bottle, which, by the way, is stackable with other Scribo bottles. I'm not sure how helpful that feature is (at least for saving space) since the bottles themselves are so massive.

(Goldspot provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

Scribo Grigio Fountain Pen Ink Review

(Sarah Read is an author, editor, yarn artist, and pen/paper/ink addict. You can find more about her at her website and on Twitter. And check out her latest book, Out of Water, now available where books are sold!)

If you follow Brad's Twitch streams, you'll know Scribo Ink as the ink that goes "thunk." It's a generous 90 ml blown-glass ink bottle in a lovely, creative design that stacks, if you collect a few of them. And once you've tried one, you'll want a few of them.

This is my first Scribo ink, but it won't be my last. This Grigio color lives somewhere at the intersection of grey, teal, and blue, and now so do I. It immediately ranks as a favorite on color alone, but it's also a very well-behaved ink.

The ink is wet and flows nicely, but has a very reasonable dry time of around 20 seconds on Rhodia paper. It shows shading beautifully, and even has a very slight sheen if you get a nice pool of it. It has almost no water resistance, and even the spot where I very carefully dabbed at the water drop is totally washed away, though the ink sat for two days between writing and water test. There's no feathering or bleeding.

Chromatography shows a complex formula for this enchanting color. There's a charcoal tone, with a soft slate blue, and a rose color that insists on photographing as brown, though it's very definitely pink-ish. The rose is a total surprise, making this one of the more delightful inks I've tested. When writing, it's dark enough to be an everyday ink, but it has enough variation in shade that it's more fun that a typical blue-black (sorry, Brad).

Beautiful, clever bottle, check. Gorgeous, complex color, check. Well-behaved writing, check. This ink wins at everything and I totally love it. The huge bottle sells for $39 at Vanness Pens. It's an expensive ink, but not unreasonably so, considering how much you get. Plus, the heavy bottle will help keep your papers from blowing away in a hurricane.

(Vanness Pens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)

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