We’re coming up on the end of Inkvent and I’m excited to see what the final few days have in store. Day 23’s ink is called Wonderland, which would have made finding a water resistance test text easy, had I not already used Winter Wonderland earlier. Hindsight and all that. It’s a standard orange ink and I was curious to see if it had any surprises to offer.
The first thing that I noticed was how unsaturated this ink is. I can look clear through the sample bottle and this lack of saturation shows. Cleaning my pens was easy and I had very little bleed-through with this ink. There was some, but much less than average. The dry time was relatively quick, falling on the short end of average. Testing Wonderland through an extra-fine nib gave me some very vivid orange lines, but this is one ink that I don’t recommend a stub nib for. It may be personal preference, but Wonderland didn’t look very good in sections were the ink was lighter.
However, it is a very bright orange, nearly fluorescent. Adding to this is the fact that this orange is a bit more yellow than red. It can be a very rich colour, and certainly an unforgettable one within this calendar. But Wonderland rides and dies on the colour alone. There’s no shimmer or sheen for added interest. For my money, I’m intrigued by this colour. It’s certainly plain and one-note, which are not things that I want from an inkvent ink, and I’m not madly in love with it, but I’m having a hard time dismissing it as “not my colour.” I think I like it more than I think I should, considering it misses a lot of boxes.
The writing experience with this ink was as expected. My lines were consistent and crisp, I had no ink flow issues and hard starts and I didn’t get too much feedback off the page. Nothing to complain about and nothing surprising. Wonderland is certainly not water resistant. While it doesn’t smear, it fades quickly and completely. I couldn’t make out anything I wrote in my water test.
Overall, Wonderland’s more exciting to me than it should be. It’s very plain ink with nothing, save the colour, that stands out. And I think that this ink really depends on the colour. If you like a bright orange, you’ll be happy with this ink, no question. If you don’t, there’s nothing else that’ll attract you to it. For me, I’m not sure exactly what I feel. I’m certainly not compelled to buy a bottle of it, but I do, for some reason, like it.
The Pen Lover's Nook 