Day 22’s ink is called Black Ivy, which is about as cool of an ink name as you’d get. There’s a certain quality about it that makes it stand out to me. It’s an extremely dark green ink with sheen, which fits the name perfectly. I was very excited to give this ink a whirl.
The big thing about Black Ivy is the colour. True to it’s name, it’s a very, very dark shade of green and almost appears like a black ink when I tested through an extra fine nib. But even then, I was able to tell that this ink was green. It’s impressive to see an ink pushed to the edge like this. This ink shades well and the lighter areas show off some interesting things about the colour. Firstly, as a green it leans more into blue than yellow and has a slight undertone of grey. It actually resembles the colour of winter greenery quite well. While I’m normally keen on sheen, it doesn’t really do much for me in Black Ivy. This ink sheens red and it’s always a cool effect to see a colour get replaced when you shine light on it, but I think the colour of this ink was good enough that it didn’t need sheen. Of course, I am totally nitpicking.
The writing experience with this ink was pretty good. It’s one of the smoother inks in this series and I only got a little bit of feedback off the page. The lines I got were crisp and consistent, and I really enjoyed writing with this ink. While I didn’t have any major ink flow issues, I did get a couple of hard starts that took a moment to fix, normally after having set my pen down for a little bit. They were quick and easy to fix, but happened a little too often.
This ink is very saturated and cleaning it out of pens and off of hands is not an easy task. I had a bit more ghosting and bleed-through than normal, but not an egregious amount. The dry time on this ink is on the long side of average, and I had a couple of instances of smudging my ink sample (though the smear on my Midori swab was just me being careless.) There’s no water resistance to speak of as my writing smeared instantly on contact with water and faded quickly. There was no chance of reading my writing after the test.
Overall, I really like Black Ivy. It’s fairly functional and a really interesting colour to me. A lot of the drawbacks that I’ve noted don’t really affect me, though the longer dry time did have me worried. I’d certainly avoid using Black Ivy in my Leuchtturm. Bu this ink checks off a lot of what I expect an Inkvent ink to be. I’d certainly be interested in acquiring more, though it’s not an everyday ink for me.
The Pen Lover's Nook 