Ink Review #108

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

Overview

The color/properties:

Dominant Industry October Leaves is a shimmering ink. The base color is a medium yellow that shades with a crisp cut and dark edges around areas where the ink pools. The tone is notably darker in areas where the ink shades, but otherwise there’s not a lot of tonal variation. The ink is, however, very bright and may be difficult to make out on something like graph paper or papers where a consecutive page has been written on with a darker ink.

The shimmer is interesting: at first I thought it was rose gold but in high concentrations I found that it was more of a pearl pink (easily visible in the droplets). In normal writing, however, it didn’t appear pink as much as it did orange. With that said, the particulates don’t often lay down heavily enough for it to show more than a light sparkle within the writing.

Rhodia

Leuchtturm1917

Performance on paper:

October Leaves behaves well and didn’t show any bleeding or feathering on most of the test papers, and even on Kokuyo, the usual bleeding was minimal and never fully bled through the page.

The dry times are okay but inconsistent and I expected better for a drier ink. They’re still serviceable and mostly took 15-20 seconds to dry with any nib size, and never more than 20 seconds.

The water resistance isn’t great, but there are some faded imprints left behind after water exposure that may be legible.

Midori MD

Maruman

Tomoe River

Kokuyo

Performance in the pen:

Unfortunately, the performance wasn’t great. October Leaves has a very dry flow, to the extent that most of my writing was spent writing a line and then waiting for the flow to catch back up again. Surprisingly, I never ran into any clogs, but there were plenty of times when I simply stopped writing because the flow was unable to keep up. It’s surprisingly well lubricated at first too, but again, as the flow isn’t able to keep up, that doesn’t last long and it becomes unpleasant. A high-flowing feed may help, but your experience may vary. On the plus side, the particulates never seemed to require much in the way of agitation to keep it flowing.

The cleaning experience was excellent! As expected for a lighter color, ink washed out of the pen immediately. However, after letting water soak in the barrel for a few hours, there weren’t any signs of a haze, or particulates left behind along the piston crown. Of course, your mileage my vary, but I wish all shimmering inks could be this easy to clean out.

• Performance in a pen: 4/10

• Performance on paper: 9.5/10

• Color saturation: 4/10

• Sheening: 0/10

• Shading: 6/10

• Dry time: 6.5/10

• Water resistance: 2/10

• Ease of cleaning: 9/10

• Shimmer: Pearl Pink, Light

My personal thoughts…

Dominant Industry October Leaves is one of those inks that disappointed me because I know just how amazing it could have been, and it came so close to greatness. I can’t emphasize enough that I love everything about the color and its shimmer, but at the end of the day, it wasn’t a pleasant experience. Even at its best, the poor flow was frustrating. This review took so much longer to complete simply because of all of the extra time spent waiting for the flow to do its thing. And frankly, I found myself begging for it to be over. So, take that for what you will. I’m not one for using additives with my inks to improve flow either; I want my inks to be good out of the bottle. In this case though, maybe it would be worth giving it a try. I added a drop of FPR Railroad X to the converter after finishing all of my controlled tests, and while it did darken the color a little, it made the ink not only usable but enjoyable. So, for what it’s worth, there’s at least a silver lining.

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