Ink Review: Diamine Wagner

Here’s how I would sum up Diamine Wagner: great performance, unusual color. It shades nicely, it is moderately saturated but light in color, it feels nicely lubricated in a fountain pen, and it has cleaned up easily for me.  It even has some water resistance: it will smudge but a legible core remains.  No feathering seen.  In fact it performs very well on poor paper.

I find it a nice companion ink with many other colors, but it’s not really dark enough for mark-up or editing.  It’s a yellowy acid green, light and bright and clear, and I don’t know of another ink it strongly resembles.

I swabbed it alongside some other unusual yellow-green inks.  The J. Herbin inks Vert Olive and Vert Pré are both lighter and brighter.  Wagner is more green and brown than Vert Olive, but yellower and not as green as Vert Pré.  Nor is it as green as more conventional avocado inks like Diamine Salamander or Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrün; Wagner is yellower than avocado.

The unusual color is both the strength and the weakness of this ink for me.  I thought I might dislike the color, but I adore it.  And I love that you don’t see similar colors from every ink manufacturer.

However, I’m on the fence about how much I can use it.  I only write with fountain pens, and no longer draw.  In writings, it’s a color that sits close to the edge of legibility.  I personally find it not only legible in a wet pen, but beautiful.  But it’s light enough that you probably wouldn’t use it in a letter to your elderly great-grandmother, or a note to your boss.

I also already own some other unusual light green and avocado inks, including all the ones shown in this review except Alt-Goldgrün. If I were just starting out, however, I think Wagner would be my first choice.  There’s something special about it.

Here is a close-up on Tomoe River Paper.

And here is a close-up with the more absorbent Staples Sustainable Earth, on which it performs admirably.

Here are the results of paper towel chromatography on Wagner.

It’s a beautiful ink, if it’s a color you like, and it behaves well. Its color sets it apart from the mainstream, which makes it very appealing.  It might be the most interesting ink I’ve used this year.