Tag: 25 Days of Dupes 2023

Phew, that’s a wrap on another 25 Days of Dupes! I’ll have to come up with something special to do for next year since it will be the 5th anniversary. If you have any ideas, let me know.

Doubtless, these Inkvent inks will get released as full bottles next year as all the others have. Hopefully this series helped you decide which — if any — to get.

Differences and Lessons Learned

This year’s 25 Days of Dupes was significantly more work since I swatched the inks on an additional paper type and created YouTube shorts.

Let’s start with that first item. I chose bad paper for the swatches. The Kokuyo paper couldn’t quite handle the heavy ink application and feathered/bledthrough with multiple inks. On top of that, the grid on the Kokuyo paper and the dots on the Franklin-Christoph and Iroful paper were obstacles to editing the swatch photos to be true-to-life.

Hello, welcome to the last week of 25 Days of Dupes 2023. Below you’ll find the inks for days 19-25. If you have a suggestion for a possible dupe for any of these inks, let me know in the comments, and I’ll add it to the wrap up post.

Some reminders:

• I’m not attempting to dupe the special properties of the inks — sheen, shimmer, scent — only the base color.
• You can click the images to view them larger.
• I swatched each ink with a small (#2) paintbrush and wrote with a Zebra G dip nib.
• Behind-the-scenes: I included more than just my final swatches for each ink. Preliminary swatches are on Iroful A5 dot grid paper. I’ve found that inks can look VERY different on this paper. I swatched the top matches on Franklin-Christoph sugar cane paper (from a leftover Firma-Flex notebook) and Kokuyo 5mm grid Sarasara loose-leaf paper.
• While I try to edit the images so they look as close to real life as possible, I can’t guarantee that the color you see on your screen will be true to life. However, with all the dupes on the same page, you’ll see how the colors look in relation to each other, which is the main point of these posts.
• I can’t fairly call any ink a perfect color match, as I’m not comparing them scientifically, I’m just using my eyes. Therefore, I won’t be going any further than calling an ink a “near-perfect color match.”
• You can view all of the shorts I’ve created for shimmer inks on my Diamine Inkvent 2023 YouTube playlist.

Enjoy, and happy inking!

Hello, welcome back to 25 Days of Dupes 2023. Below you’ll find the inks for days 12-18. If you have a suggestion for a possible dupe for any of these inks, let me know in the comments, and I’ll add it to the wrap up post.

Some reminders:

• I’m not attempting to dupe the special properties of the inks — sheen, shimmer, scent — only the base color.
• You can click the images to view them larger.
• I swatched each ink with a small (#2) paintbrush and wrote with a Zebra G dip nib.
• Behind-the-scenes: I included more than just my final swatches for each ink. Preliminary swatches are on Iroful A5 dot grid paper. I’ve found that inks can look VERY different on this paper. I swatched the top matches on Franklin-Christoph sugar cane paper (from a leftover Firma-Flex notebook) and Kokuyo 5mm grid Sarasara loose-leaf paper.
• While I try to edit the images so they look as close to real life as possible, I can’t guarantee that the color you see on your screen will be true to life. However, with all the dupes on the same page, you’ll see how the colors look in relation to each other, which is the main point of these posts.
• I can’t fairly call any ink a perfect color match, as I’m not comparing them scientifically, I’m just using my eyes. Therefore, I won’t be going any further than calling an ink a “near-perfect color match.”
• You can view all of the shorts I’ve created for shimmer inks on my Diamine Inkvent 2023 YouTube playlist.

Enjoy, and happy inking!

Hello, welcome back to 25 Days of Dupes 2023. Below you’ll find the inks for days 5-11. If you have a suggestion for a possible dupe for any of these inks, let me know in the comments, and I’ll add it to the wrap up post.

Some reminders:

• I’m not attempting to dupe the special properties of the inks — sheen, shimmer, scent — only the base color.
• You can click the images to view them larger.
• I swatched each ink with a small (#2) paintbrush and wrote with a Zebra G dip nib.
• Behind-the-scenes: I included more than just my final swatches for each ink. Preliminary swatches are on Iroful A5 dot grid paper. I’ve found that inks can look VERY different on this paper. I swatched the top matches on Franklin-Christoph sugar cane paper (from a leftover Firma-Flex notebook) and Kokuyo 5mm grid Sarasara loose-leaf paper.
• While I try to edit the images so they look as close to real life as possible, I can’t guarantee that the color you see on your screen will be true to life. However, with all the dupes on the same page, you’ll see how the colors look in relation to each other, which is the main point of these posts.
• I can’t fairly call any ink a perfect color match, as I’m not comparing them scientifically, I’m just using my eyes. Therefore, I won’t be going any further than calling an ink a “near-perfect color match.”
• You can view all of the shorts I’ve created for shimmer inks on my Diamine Inkvent 2023 YouTube playlist.

Enjoy, and happy inking!

Hello, welcome to the first post of 25 Days of Dupes 2023. Below you’ll find the inks for days 1-4. If you have a suggestion for a possible dupe for any of these inks, let me know in the comments, and I’ll add it to the wrap up post.

Some info:

• You can click the images to view them larger.
• I swatched each ink with a small (#2) paintbrush and wrote with a Zebra G dip nib.
• Behind-the-scenes: I included more than just my final swatches for each ink. Preliminary swatches are on Iroful A5 dot grid paper. I’ve found that inks can look VERY different on this paper. I swatched the top matches on Franklin-Christoph sugar cane paper (from a leftover Firma-Flex notebook) and Kokuyo 5mm grid Sarasara loose-leaf paper.
• While I try to edit the images so they look as close to real life as possible, I can’t guarantee that the color you see on your screen will be true to life. However, with all the dupes on the same page, you’ll see how the colors look in relation to each other, which is the main point of these posts.
• I can’t fairly call any ink a perfect color match, as I’m not comparing them scientifically, I’m just using my eyes. Therefore, I won’t be going any further than calling an ink a “near-perfect color match.”
• Reminder: I’m not attempting to dupe the special properties of the inks — sheen, shimmer, scent — only the base color.

Enjoy, and happy inking!

Thanks to David of the DC Pen Crew, I will once again be duping the Diamine Inkvent calendar. Like last year, I’m posting once a week with all of the inks from that week.

Also like last year, I’m basing my posting day on Christmas. Since Christmas is on Monday, I’ll be posting on Tuesdays. My first dupe post will be on the 5th, with the inks from December 1-4. My final dupe post will be on the 26th, with inks from December 19-25. And I’ll have a wrap-up/reference post on the 27th linking to the 4 dupe posts and listing the best dupe for each ink.