Ink Battle: Troublemaker and Diamine

This ink battle is between Troublemaker Butterfly Dream and Diamine Classic Green. Both inks are in a pen fitted with a #6 Jowo EF nib. The paper is Muji plain loose leaf refill.

This is another battle where I own a bottle of one color (Butterfly Dream) and a sample of the other. I like Classic Green, but wasn’t sure it made sense to buy a bottle.

You can assume I have no problems with any ink that appears in an ink battle. The point of the battle is to choose a winner of the two colors. I use a pair of similar inks in pens with the same nib, then test them out to see which I like better. Generally, I’m trying to decide which ink to keep, but sometimes I’m trying to decide which to buy, or if I should buy one ink when I already have a similar one.

I may find out that, when used with the same nib, they’re sufficiently different to own them both. Depending on how these battles turn out, I may tag some of the posts as ink dupes as well. You can find all of the ink battles posts on the tag page.

While inks are not identical — which is most obvious in the scribble section — and look even more different with the shimmer, they do seem to be roughly the same hue and saturation. In some of the writing, Classic Green is noticeably darker, but I’d call both it and Butterfly Dream “off-black” ink.

Butterfly Dreams doesn’t have much more room to shade than Classic Green does, but it reveals a beautiful complexity in the water test that makes me want to play with it like watercolor.

If you like shimmer, I’d suggest getting the Troublemaker ink; the blue shimmer is gorgeous. If you want to avoid shimmer, go with Classic Green, as Troublemaker shimmer doesn’t settle completely.

For myself, the base colors are similar enough that I can say it’s not worth getting a bottle of Classic Green.

Scorecard

In this battle, Butterfly Dream’s complexity in the water test and beautiful blue shimmer earned it the extra points necessary to win.

Trait	Butterfly Dream	Classic Green
Hue	10	10
Saturation	10	10
Lightness	10	9
Complexity	10	9
Bonus Points	1	0

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

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