Ink Review #110

*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.

Overview

The color/properties:

Dominant Industry Autumn Forest is a shimmering ink. The base color is a warm brown-green with nice shading and high tonal variation where the ink pools. The ink appears with more green where it lays down lighter and more brown where it pools heavily. The particulates are pearl pink and easy to make out over the base color. Together they make a highly unique color — so unique that Sarah and I had a lot of difficulty finding a good pen to pair it with, but it’s a color I like quite a lot.

Rhodia

Leuchtturm1917

Performance on paper:

Autumn Forest is very well-behaved, and there was minimal bleed-through even on the Kokuyo sheet with the flex nib. The other sheets didn’t show any signs of bleeding or feathering, nor were there any traces in the droplets or ink splat. This ink should behave well on most fountain pen-friendly papers.

The dry times are average. Large nib sizes all dried within 15-20 seconds; the smaller sizes, however, took about 5 seconds longer than average to dry (especially on Leuchtturm, where the dry times were consistently longer).

The water resistance isn’t the best, but after water exposure, there are at least some traces of pink shadows left behind that might be legible, especially where the ink lays down heavier.

Midori MD

Maruman

Tomoe River

Kokuyo

Performance in the pen:

Before I was able to get a bottle of my own, I’d frequently heard that Autumn Forest was a dry ink. I suppose that objectively, that’s still true — it has a dry flow, but I don’t think it’s that bad either. I found the ink to be fairly smooth, consistent, and enjoyable. I never experienced a clog, and I didn’t have any issues with the flow slowing down during long writing sessions (though, depending on how much faster you write, that may be an issue). The shimmer distribution wasn’t an issue either, and I didn’t have much of a need to agitate the pen to keep it flowing during my writing. The ink overall works well.

The cleaning experience unfortunately isn’t quite as good. The color itself washes out of the pen easily, but it did leave a thick haze of shimmer along the inside of the barrel of the pen. Like many shimmering inks, this is easy to remove, but in my case, it requires disassembly of the pen to scrub it out with a cotton swab.

• Performance in a pen: 8/10

• Performance on paper: 9/10

• Color saturation: 6/10

• Sheening: 0/10

• Shading: 7/10

• Dry time: 7/10

• Water resistance: 3/10

• Ease of cleaning: 6.5/10

• Shimmer: Pearl Pink, Light

My personal thoughts…

I was having a lot of fun with this ink when it suddenly came to mind: What is an Autumn Forest, and does this look like it? The immediate response to my own question was no, at least not in the conventional sense. What comes to mind is a brighter forest filled with a palette of browns, yellows, oranges, and reds. And yet, there’s something about this ink that does feel unmistakably Autumnal. What is it? After having a good look at it, maybe what I’m seeing is Autumnal in a muddier, damper, foggier way. Imagine a misty Autumn morning, it just rained the night before, there are some shimmering wet leaves on the ground clumping into a purplish brown mass on the grass shining in the dim casts of light that break through the trees and the fog. It feels almost other-worldly, as if you’d accidentally set foot inside a fairy ring. There’s your Autumn Forest. And you know what? I really love it. Maybe just as much as Autumn Oak, though for totally different reasons, this is Autumnal perfection.

More images/info:

Tools and materials used in the writing samples:

• A TWSBI Diamond 580 with 5 nib units including an EF, F, M, B, 1.1mm stub and a 5.5 FPR Ultraflex nib. All nibs are tuned to perform at the same wetness.

• A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad

• A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook

• A Midori MD A5 Notebook

• A 52gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook

• A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook

• A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook