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Ink Battle: Diamine and Diamine

Posted in Ink

This ink battle is between Diamine Wistful Watermelon and Diamine Sailors Warning. Both inks are in a TWSBI 580 with a F nib. The paper is Muji loose leaf plain.

Today’s ink battle is another bout of bottle versus sample. It determined if I buy a bottle of Sailors Warning, or relegate the sample to the “for dupes” baskets. I tend to prefer to buy bottles of shimmer ink, since the samples are often light on the shimmer.

For those unfamiliar with these inks, Wistful Watermelon is part of the Cult Pens exclusive Fresh Fruit series and Sailors Warning is one of two colors chosen by members of the fountainpens Subreddit in 2022 or 2023. Sailors Warning has been rebranded as Red Sky with some retailers and has a very interesting shimmer that looks either blue, silver, or pink depending on the light. I’m assuming it’s a multichrome shimmer, but I can’t find anything online to support that. For this battle, I shook the sample, but then let it mostly settle.

Between myself and Jim buying inks, we own far too many. This means I have some inks that are incredibly similar in color. And, because of that, I need to figure out which inks to keep and which to dispose of. Sometimes, I have samples of two or more similar inks that I'm trying to decide which to buy, or if I should buy one ink when I already own a bottle of a similar one.

Enter ink battles. I put the similar inks into pens with the same nibs (two Jowo #6 M, two TWSBI F, etc.), or I create ink splats and doodles, to test them out to see which I like better. Or, I may find out that they’re sufficiently different to keep.

You can assume I have no problems with any ink that appears in an ink battle. I may find, when using the inks side-by-side, that there are performance differences, but the point of the battle is to choose a favorite ink, a "winner". These choices are often subjective, and you may disagree with me.

An ink battle — unlike ink dupes — is between inks I like. I enjoy using them enough to have them in my "for use" ink collection — as opposed to my repository of inks for testing dupes. If an ink performed poorly or caused problems, I wouldn’t keep it. And, if that were the case, an ink battle would be unnecessary.

Reminder: You can find all of the ink battle posts on the tag page.

The techniques I used for this battle are a bit different. I want to put more focus on the ink comparisons, and provide more ink to play with for the water tests. To that end, I chose to write the alphabet instead of several pangrams and quadrupled the size of the water test swatches. Let me know what you think of the changes.

As I’ve mentioned in past ink posts, red-based inks are a nightmare to photograph and edit. I’ve done my best to get them true-to-life, but they’re still a bit off.


These two colors are different enough to keep me from calling them dupes. While both could be considered reds, Wistful Watermelon is closer to pink, and Sailors Warning just starts leaning toward orange. Sailors Warning is darker and a bit more saturated.

Comparing Diamine Wistful Watermelon and Diamine Sailors Warning by writing on adjacent lines.

Neither ink shows any complexity int he water test, but they both have some shading visible in the scribble section. Sailors Warning’s shimmer is just barely visible in a couple of places, most notably in the second row of letters.

Having tested these two together, I wish I’d gotten Sailors Warning over Wistful Watermelon. While Wistful Watermelon lives up to it’s name — It’s the color of ripe watermelon — Sailors Warning is more appealing to me.

Scorecard

Because neither ink shows even a hint of complexity, I’m not awarding any points for that category. Sailors Warning wins every round with ease, and now I just have to decide if I’m keeping Wistful Watermelon.

TraitWistful
Watermelon
Sailors
Warning
Hue910
Saturation910
Lightness910
Complexity
Bonus Points01

What do you think? Should I keep Wistful Watermelon? Which one is your favorite? Let me know in the comments! I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed my post. Make sure to subscribe to my blog or follow me on Instagram so you don’t miss any posts. I generally post at least once a week.

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