Waterman Audacious Red
Ink Review # 56
*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.
Overview
The color/properties:
Waterman Audacious Red is a medium red. There’s some light shading with a soft cut where the ink pools, but there isn’t a high amount of tonal variation, and the shading areas are only slightly darker. To my surprise, when the droplets and ink splats dried, there was a green sheen. It looks great on this color, and I wish that I had been able to get a slight sheen when writing with this ink, but there wasn’t any. It might be possible with some pen and paper combinations, but I wouldn’t expect this to occur under normal circumstances.
Ink Splat
Ink Droplets
Performance on paper:
Aside from some typical bleed-through on the Kokuyo paper, I didn’t experience any other detectable bleeding or feathering on the other papers. Most fountain pen-friendly papers should be able to handle this ink.
The dry times were slightly above average, with the large nib sizes usually drying within the 15-second mark, but there were a few instances where it extended to 20 seconds.
There unfortunately wasn’t a lot of water resistance, and water exposure led to most of the color being washed away or too hazy to clearly make out.
Water resistance
Chromatography
Performance in the pen:
Audacious Red performed better than I thought it would! It has a dry-medium flow, and I expected there would be a lot of hard starting, but I didn’t experience any (there was one visible hard start with the broad nib on Tomoe River, but it was a user error). The ink isn’t especially slick, but it was enough to make the writing experience comfortable enough.
It only took a single flush to clear the ink out of the nib units during cleaning, but inside the pen, the ink left a red ring around the inside of the barrel. This mostly came out after letting the barrel soak with water overnight, but the acrylic still had a red hue until the pen was disassembled so I could scrub it out.
Small note: this ink tends to crust up fairly quickly, especially around the bottle opening, and can leave dry ink flakes that can make a terrible mess.
Written on 52 gsm Tomoe River paper (white) with a medium nib.
Written on Midori MD paper (cream) with a medium nib.
Performance in a pen: 9.5/10
Performance on paper: 9/10
Color saturation: 6/10
Sheening: 1/10
Shading: 3.5/10
Dry time: 8/10
Water resistance: 1/10
Ease of cleaning: 7.5/10
Shimmer: None
My personal thoughts…
Waterman Audacious Red was an ink that I purchased early on in my fountain pen hobby. It was my first red, and I hated it. I find that it has a faded, almost washed-out look to it that makes it feel cheap, almost like a bad ballpoint red. That hasn’t changed much, either — I still don’t care for it. The color simply doesn’t do anything for me. It just feels so bland. I’m always surprised to hear that someone loves this color, but to each their own, I suppose. On the plus side, it does work well. I genuinely started to enjoy how it was performing when it was in the needlepoint nib during my tests! But there’s not much else I can say about it. It’s a red ink, and it’s fine. I don’t love it, but you might.
Written on 52 gsm Tomoe River paper with an Esterbrook J (medium nib).
More images/info:
Tools and materials used in the writing samples:
A TWSBI Diamond 580 AL with 7 nib units including a Needlepoint grind, EF, F, M, B, 1.1mm stub, and an Architect grind. All nibs are tuned to perform at the same medium wetness.
A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad
A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook
A Midori MD A5 Notebook
A 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook
A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook
A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook