(Jeff Abbott is a regular contributor at The Pen Addict. You can find more from Jeff online at Draft Evolution and Twitter.)
For the past few months, I've been trying to introduce more green into my fountain pen ink rotation. I wouldn't say I'm going all green all the time, but I am trying to include more green at a slow pace during these cold months. The latest ink I've been trying was supposed to be in this green genre, but it turned out to be a little more blue than I anticipated! Despite that error on my side, Diamine Marine is still a gorgeous blue-green ink that pops off the page.
Before getting into all the specifics of this color, it's fair to point out that this, like all other Diamine inks I've used, is extremely well-behaved and easy to use. The color is bright and accurate to their marketing swatches, and the price is really hard to beat. There's a reason I have so many Diamine inks in my collection at this point: they just work so well.
Marine is primarily a green ink, but it has a heavy blue undertone that you can't ignore. Diamine classifies this as a turquoise ink, but I'm not sure I agree. Any color in the realm of turquoise, teal, aquamarine, blue-green, green-blue, or other popular mixtures are highly subjective when it comes to naming and identifying the colors. To me, Marine looks more teal, but there are certain natural turquoise colors in nature that look just like Marine as well. It's a spectrum, and that just means there isn't one right answer! In this case, just know that Marine is a green-blue color.
Questions of exact color aside, it's a gorgeous ink. I've really been enjoying using it because it makes me think of green (which is always a happy color to me), water, and also mint. The green is just light enough to bring out some mint comparisons, and the blue just adds a bit of depth to an otherwise flat color.
It's this additional depth of color that contributes to the minimal shading that this ink exhibits. Without the blue undertones, there wouldn't be much shading. Lucky for us, there's a good amount of color variation between light and dark strokes. This is more pronounced with larger nibs, but you can still see a good amount of variation with small or dry nibs.
One area that really surprised me with this ink is the dry time. I was anticipating something in the 15-second range, but I was really astonished when I discovered this ink was drying in the 5-10 second range depending on how wide/wet the nib stroke was. I'm still fairly shocked and impressed by this. It's hard to find any inks that dry that fast, let alone one with so much color saturation. If you're looking for a fast-drying ink and don't mine that it's a green-blue, this is a great place to start.
Like a lot of Diamine inks, you have several options regarding purchasing. With Marine, you can go for cartridges (box of 18), a 30ml bottle (my personal favorite), or an 80ml bottle.
(JetPens provided this product at no charge to The Pen Addict for review purposes.)
