Three Greens

July 20, 2014

*Reposted from my blog*

To follow up on my post from yesterday, I did a quick comparison of three green inks that are currently in my possession. I haven’t written up the full review of Aventurine yet (actually I have now, it's here), but my review of Verdura is here and eventually I’ll do a review of Shin-Ryoku as well (for a neat mix that uses Shin-Ryoku, you can lookhere…), but here’s the quick and dirty side-by-side:

A few notes on the scan - the Aventurine looks pretty true to life, at least on my monitor. The Verdura comes out a little bit light, and the Shin-Ryoku is a touch washed out, but not drastically so. Anyway, I didn’t want to do any color adjusting because what would probably make one look the best would screw up the other two. :-P

After seeing them all together, I would call Aventurine the purest green of the three. It’s like the color of the most perfect lawn that your neurotic neighbor spends waaayyyy too much time maintaining. Shin-Ryoku has a lot more blue component and is more like the color of a spruce tree. As for Verdura, I stick with my original description and would call it a vibrant shamrock green, the color of stuff that emerges around St. Patrick’s Day.

All of these inks are similar in terms of behavior - no water resistance, smooth flow, not too much feathering and bleeding on good paper, and easy to clean out of your pen. If you aren’t too picky, Verdura is by far the cheapest, at ~$12, and then there’s Aventurine at ~$23 and Shin-Ryoku at ~$28 (online prices for 50 mL bottles here in the States). Given that I already have a nearly full bottle of Verdura and half a bottle of Shin-Ryoku, I probably won’t spring for Aventurine anytime soon, but perhaps it will be next on my list of greens when the time comes… Which one is your favorite?

July 20, 2014

Nice! and I like your mix with Shin-Ryoku. While I love green, for some reason I'm not that enamored with green-green inks. I prefer the murkier ones, and since I have some Heart of Darkness...hmmm