Every week this month I’ve had to completely re-evaluate all my plans and expectations. So I got a late start with Inkvent after a sudden emergency, but I’ve been swatching inks daily since I caught up and it has been a nice ritual amidst the chaos. Turns out the chaos of a house in the middle of packing makes for terrible photography conditions so I haven’t been keeping up with that so much, but here’s the first few swatches from when I was lucky enough to get a day with ok light.

Day 1: Celestial Skies. Lovely lightly teal-leaning blue with a touch of red sheen and gold shimmer. This was amazing in the dip pen — lots of shimmer and the sheen around every letter looks spectacular. If it looks half as good in a regular pen this will be a treat.

Day 2: Energy: purple with green sheen. Looks cooler in the swatch than in regular writing but I really like the underlying purple and don’t mind the sheen but I wish it was a little less intense so you could see more of the purple through it. Since the dip pen tends to be wetter and thus showcase more sheen, I may like this one a lot better in a regular pen. But it’ll be usable either way.

Day 3: Carousel. Red with a very tiny bit of gold sheen that makes it look like enamel paint. I really love it. This one is listed as a pigment ink. I didn’t think to test how waterproof it was but it was definitely harder to clean off my tools. I’ve been looking for a “correction pen red” kind of colour so I’m pretty delighted to have this one even if I may need to be careful to put it only in pens I can clean easily.

Day 4: Smoky Tobacco. Brown with a tobacco scent. I saw someone describe this as smelling like cancer. It definitely made my nose unhappy when I had the bottle open for a bit, so I’m probably minorly allergic to this, or it smells enough of tobacco that it’s brining back bad memories of all the second hand smoke one used to inhale in restaurants and bars before cigarette bans started to happen. Thankfully the smell doesn’t seem to linger on the page and once I realized my nose was running and closed the bottle I was able to write with it okay so it could just be that there’s a bit more alcohol in there than usual and it won’t be an issue in practice. It’s a nice enough brown with a bit of a black sheen on the iroful paper (not pictured, my swatches on Rhodia) and I don’t have anything particularly similar, but we’ll see if the smell is a dealbreaker in practice.

I think of these four, Celestial Skies will be the first one to go into a pen and I might not even wait until the end of the month.