Diamine German Exclusive Sheening Inks

In addition to their massive range of inks, Diamine also collaborates with stores all over the world to create exclusive colors. Five of these exclusives were made for the German market and I was lucky to get bottles from Papier & Stift - so a big thank you to Anja for sending these to me! Otherwise they're a bit tricky to get your hands on! Each 80ml bottle is about €9.00 each, which is pretty reasonable.

• Diamine November Rain - this one is a deep forest green, very saturated, with a dark red sheen. 
• Diamine Smoke on the Water - A wild dark teal with a blazing red sheen.
• Diamine Purple Rain - A dark purple-black with a golden sheen.
• Diamine Calligraphy Passion - the odd one in the bunch - this one shows off its yellow green to light green shading best instead of sheen.
• Diamine Skull & Roses - a gorgeous dark blue with that intense red sheen.

These inks look wild on the page. They sheen so easily that you don't even have to go hunting for the perfect combination of nib and paper to see it. It just glows on the page. With finer, wet writers, the base color is harder to see and you mostly get sheen. With wider nibs like stubs, you can more clearly see the base color as well as the sheen. Calligraphy passion looks great in wide stub nibs, like when you're practicing broad edge scripts. Delicious. 

Aside from Calligraphy Passion, the other four inks are super heavily saturated. You can expect sheen on the mouth of your bottles and in the threads of the lid. I would recommend wiping all the threads down with a wet paper towel before you close the bottle. Otherwise, if the sheen builds up, it can prevent the bottle from sealing and you can get leakage. Trust me, you do not want these inks to leak. If they splatter on your sink, they take a heck of a lot of work to clean up properly. Drying times are long and if you have a super wet ink application, you still might get smudging in the saturated sheening spots. They're a lot of work. They're also really spectacular and make handwriting and lettering pop off the page. 

To maintain your sanity, do not let these dry out in your pens, especially if you are brave and put them in a pen that is harder to clean. Flush, flush, flush. These inks do really well in Pilot Parallel calligraphy pens and they're super easy to clean so they're a match made in heaven in my books.