Ink Review: Diamine Meadow

[Chrissy]

Today I'm reviewing Diamine Meadow ink.

Diamine Meadow is an unsaturated, yellowish green, dye based ink. Its from Diamine Inks standard range.

This is a darker and greener shade than J.Herbin Vert Pré/Apple scented and P.I. Chiku rin, and a lighter and less gold/brown shade than R&K Alt. Goldgrün and Sailor Waka uguisu. In fact I dont have an ink really similar as a comparison.

I found it quite an unusual ink to write with. Sometimes it shaded a lot and felt wet and lubricated, particularly with my M and B nibs, yet when I first used it in my Lamy 2000 with F nib, it felt drier and less lubricated. It seems to behave quite differently depending on the pen, its nib, and the paper.

• Flow Rate: Good. Felt wet with my M & B nibs.
• Lubrication: OK - better with M & B nibs.
• Nib Dry-out: Not noticed.
• Start-up: Immediate.
• Saturation: Unsaturated ink.
• Shading Potential: An unusual shading ink, quite variable.
• Sheen: None seen.
• Show-Through:
  • Tomoe River 52gsm.
  • Tom Bihn Lined.
  • Generic 80gsm lined pads.

• Spread / Feathering / Woolly Line: Not seen.
• Nib Creep / Crud: Not seen, even after over 1 week in the pen.
• Staining (pen): Not seen after several days in the pen - easy clean-up with water.
• Staining (hands): Easy clean-up with bar soap.
• Clogging: Not seen. Seems unlikely.
• Water resistance: Not sold as waterproof but has surprisingly good water resistance.
• Availability: Available from Diamine Inks web-site and many other outlets.

[KaB]

THX for the nice review. Ink looks quite attractive to me.

[Chrissy]

  On 7/13/2018 at 6:02 AM, KaB said:

THX for the nice review. Ink looks quite attractive to me.

 

You're welcome. I'm pleased that you like it. Many users seem to prefer darker green inks.

[KaB]

  On 7/13/2018 at 6:07 AM, Chrissy said:

 

You're welcome. I'm pleased that you like it. Many users seem to prefer darker green inks.

 

 

So do I, to some degree: don't deprive me of my GvfC Moss Green for pens that I'll be taking to the office. But R&K Alt Goldgrün will put a smile on my face when working at home

[lgsoltek]

I like this one as well, but for similar colours I still prefer Akkerman #28 which has more “depth” to me...

[wasteland]

Lovely review. I appreciate the thoroughness.

 

I have this ink and your scans o it justice.

 

I am partial to yellow greens and like this one quite a bit but find it unsuitable for writing at length. An entire page written in Meadow is hard on the eyes unless one has very large handwriting. It works nicely for underlining and marginalia.

[lapis]

Nice review. The startling thing (IMO) is that its tendency to lean yellow going along a Lamy F-to-M-to-B route doesn't seem to be very linear.... I guess it's just the range of pen-and-nib wetness, not the width of the nib....

[namrehsnoom]

Great review, Chrissy. This looks a beautiful yellow-green. I found Jade Green too light for my tastes. This Meadow Green darkens that up a bit, and might just be what I am looking for in a yellow-green ink. I have a sample of it, but haven't gotten around yet to give it a try. Time to ink up a pen with it...

[minddance]

This is one ink I consider very problematic due to the very high inclination to shade dramatically. It can skew towards yellow in most dry pens and the beautiful green can appear only in very wet pens and on absorbent papers. It also sheens at very wet levels.

 

It is essentially a mid-light colour and shades too readily for me, and this gives a very messy look overall. Very difficult to read (especially with smaller writing), but fun to play with and never boring. Mine is an old version with gray and black label on the bottle.

 

This ink is for fun and nothing serious. For flex dip pens and large writing, it works beautifully. But in a dry Pilot and other Japanese fine nib, it is pale, and/or shadey and messy. Never a boring moment - if one likes the colour.

 

The Lamy Broad in this review, ironically I find, makes it alot messier and difficult to read, and in my opinion not how a broad nib ought to write. Perhaps it is the nib contact with the paper.

 

(On a personal note, I (had to) add Kodak photoflo to subdue the shading and the perceived oiliness in this ink. Or I fill it in a pen and leave it filled forever for it to darken and get saturated then I use it after months. The shading is too wild and illegibility too serious for me.)

 

Splashes and swabs give absolutely no idea how this ink writes in a pen. I appreciate very much the work done using real pens (filled and not dipped) and thank you for showing the ink to us in that manner

Edited July 14, 2018 by minddance

[inkstainedruth]

I tried this several years ago and didn't really care for it (although it was more legible than Diamine Kelly Green).

Keep thinking I might mix what's left of the sample with the rest of the sample I have of Private Reserve Avocado, to lighten that and darken this....

Thanks for the review, though.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Chrissy]

  On 7/13/2018 at 8:26 AM, wasteland said:

Lovely review. I appreciate the thoroughness.

 

I have this ink and your scans o it justice.

 

I am partial to yellow greens and like this one quite a bit but find it unsuitable for writing at length. An entire page written in Meadow is hard on the eyes unless one has very large handwriting. It works nicely for underlining and marginalia.

 

You're welcome.

 

I used to have P.I. Chiku rin and reached a similar conclusion after writing with it on several pages in a notebook.

[Chrissy]

  On 7/13/2018 at 11:26 AM, lapis said:

Nice review. The startling thing (IMO) is that its tendency to lean yellow going along a Lamy F-to-M-to-B route doesn't seem to be very linear.... I guess it's just the range of pen-and-nib wetness, not the width of the nib....

You're welcome.

 

You're right: it seems like the more ink flow through the pen, the wetter the ink seems and the more green it looks. I noticed that as soon as I wrote with the other 2 Lamy pens. The width of the nib seems to accentuate this.

[Chrissy]

  On 7/14/2018 at 3:48 AM, minddance said:

This is one ink I consider very problematic due to the very high inclination to shade dramatically. It can skew towards yellow in most dry pens and the beautiful green can appear only in very wet pens and on absorbent papers. It also sheens at very wet levels.

 

It is essentially a mid-light colour and shades too readily for me, and this gives a very messy look overall. Very difficult to read (especially with smaller writing), but fun to play with and never boring. Mine is an old version with gray and black label on the bottle.

 

This ink is for fun and nothing serious. For flex dip pens and large writing, it works beautifully. But in a dry Pilot and other Japanese fine nib, it is pale, and/or shadey and messy. Never a boring moment - if one likes the colour.

 

The Lamy Broad in this review, ironically I find, makes it alot messier and difficult to read, and in my opinion not how a broad nib ought to write. Perhaps it is the nib contact with the paper.

 

(On a personal note, I (had to) add Kodak photoflo to subdue the shading and the perceived oiliness in this ink. Or I fill it in a pen and leave it filled forever for it to darken and get saturated then I use it after months. The shading is too wild and illegibility too serious for me.)

 

Splashes and swabs give absolutely no idea how this ink writes in a pen. I appreciate very much the work done using real pens (filled and not dipped) and thank you for showing the ink to us in that manner

My Lamy B nib always seems to write quite wet. It's easily the wettest of all of my Lamy nibs. What I tend to do is to fill a Lamy converter, then just pull off the nib and swap in another one. However, I didn't do this here. I swapped the converter over to the other pen.

 

You can see how differently the B nib wrote when I started writing (at the bottom of the page) and when I picked up the uncapped pen again to write at the top of the page. It started off wetter and became slightly drier hence the colour shift. This pen was filled through the nib.

[Chrissy]

  On 7/14/2018 at 4:00 AM, inkstainedruth said:

I tried this several years ago and didn't really care for it (although it was more legible than Diamine Kelly Green).

Keep thinking I might mix what's left of the sample with the rest of the sample I have of Private Reserve Avocado, to lighten that and darken this....

Thanks for the review, though.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

You're welcome.

 

I like Kelly Green and Meadow for different reasons.

[pen_master]

In-depth analysis. Great job! They could have also called it Diamine Key Lime!

Edited July 14, 2018 by pen_master

[Chrissy]

  On 7/14/2018 at 12:48 PM, pen_master said:

In-depth analysis. Great job!

 

You're welcome.

[djmaher]

This seems to be a very similar color to Diamine Calligraphy, which is one of those Germany-exclusive inks. A friend of mine brought a bottle back for me, probably because it was an Exclusive.

 

The problem I'm having is that it is sort-of "light" color, although bright and vibrant. Not sure if I'm wording that correctly.

 

Anyway, I'm trying to "figure out" how to use it to its best capability (and my own, of course)

 

With an EF or F nib, the ink almost seems invisible on the page. The shading and color becomes much more noticeable with a M nib, on up.

 

As weird as this sounds, this, to me, seems like one of those times where an ink company releases the same ink, under two different names, and maybe sells them in different markets that way, as two "different" inks?

 

I guess I don't know enough about ink companies to know if they intentionally do this.

 

Do they? And, if so, has anyone ever made sense of why they do it?

[Bo Bo Olson]

My bottle was murky. The ink finished behind Lamy green, in a 10 or so green ink test on good paper, it was the worst.

And I don't have anything against murky, when murky is done right...dull, murky and iccky is what my bottle gave me.

 

Someone else disagreed with me, in he to must have had a good bottle.

 

Your bottle reminds me of DA Moss Green; a light green spring moss color.