Diamine’s day 9 ink is called Storm, and I will admit to frowning a bit when I saw it. It’s a dark blue ink with shimmer and if that sounds familiar, you’ve obviously seen day 4’s ink. To address the hippopotamus in the room, Tempest and Storm share a lot of similarities, and it does seem odd that there’s only 5 days separating these inks on the calendar. Both are dark blue ink with shimmer, with names that are synonyms of each other. Obviously, I didn’t expect a complete repeat, but I was curious to see what the differences were.
As I’ve noted, Storm is a dark blue and it has a hint of grey in it as well. It’s not a dark as Tempest, but I would call it a lighter version. Interestingly, and so far as I can tell, this colour hasn’t been done in an Inkvent calendar before. In fact, it has significant differences when compared to inks that I would consider the closest. This is impressive considering there were six blue inks in the last calendar. The shimmer is also a major difference, as it’s a sliver shimmer and not as prominent as Tempest’s gold. You catch a glint of it every so often, and it’s a rather nice, understated, effect.
The writing experience was as rough as I expected it to be. There were some ink flow issues and hard starts, and I got a lot of feedback off the page. It wasn’t horrible, but fairly annoying. When you get this ink flowing, it’s actually not a bad experience, but it takes a while and you’re not guaranteed to get it to work well. Of course, Storm preforms better in broader pens and I had no trouble with my 1.1 stub.
Besides that, Storm’s pretty well behaved, It didn’t have much bleed-through or ghosting with this ink, which was a bit surprising considering the vibrancy of the colour. The lines I got were crisp and didn’t spread much, though that could be down to having limited ink flow at times. The dry times are also pretty short, which is great to see as a lefty.
As for water resistance, I’m going to say that Storm holds up alright. It’s certainly not water resistant by any standard, smudging instantly at the first touch of water, but after drying, my writing was decently clear. The Midori paper washed completely out, but the other two sample was legible, if quite faded.
Overall, Storm is more impressive than I thought it would be. It is, despite my reservations, and unique colour, and a nice one at that. It does a lot of things well and I can’t nitpick on it. Of course, my experience with shimmer inks continues to be an issue, but I have to acknowledge that my normal usage isn’t where these inks excel. So, I think Storm’s a good ink and I might consider it for my “to buy list.”
The Pen Lover's Nook 