Ink Review: Diamine Smoke on the Water (Germany Exclusive)

[Chrissy]

Today I'm reviewing Diamine Smoke on the Water ink. This is a Diamine Exclusive ink made specially for sale in Germany.

It’s a saturated dark teal/blue-green ink with heavy red sheen. It doesn’t have as much sheen as the Organics Studio very high sheen inks, but has much more sheen than what you would call a “standard” ink.

It’s more blue/teal than November Rain and Dark Forest, but a darker teal and more saturated than Aurora Borealis. It’s a very similar colour to Organics Studio Walden Pond.
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 Diamine high sheen inks.
It dried quite quickly on most papers and once dry it didn’t smudge or smear. I tested for this by rubbing repeatedly across my writing.
It wrote quite wet in my pens and I really enjoyed writing with it.

With these high sheen inks showthrough and bleedthrough can be a problem. There was a little showthrough on a couple 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 and can be paper dependant. It's most noticeable on very smooth, non-absorbent papers.

• Flow Rate: Very good.
• Lubrication: Very good.
• Nib Dry-out: Not noticed.
• Start-up: Immediate.
• Saturation: Highly saturated ink.
• Shading Potential: Some shading seen with finer nibs or dry writing pens.
• Sheen: Plenty of red sheen.
• Show-Through/Bleedthrough: Not a problem on the papers I used.
• Spread / Feathering / Woolly Line: Not seen.
• 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.
• Clogging: Not seen in my pens. Probably pen dependent.
• Water resistance: Not sold as waterproof but has some water resistance.
• Availability: Exclusive to Germany and available in 30ml plastic bottles and 80ml glass bottles from: Fountainfeder, and Seitz-Kreuznach

Diamine Smoke.jpg