Wearingeul Wendy Darling
Ink Review #63
*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.
Overview
The color/properties:
Wendy Darling is a shimmering ink with pearl white particulates. The base color is a pale blue with heavy shading characteristics, featuring brighter and more vibrant blue tones around the edges of letters and where the ink pools. There’s also a slight pink glow in less saturated areas of the writing that’s easily visible with larger nibs sizes. The pearl shimmer is bright, easy to see, and distributes evenly throughout the writing regardless of nib size. With that said, this ink is exceptionally pale and, in most cases, difficult to see. Normally with pale inks, you might have higher difficulties seeing them on graph paper or when there’s a darker ink used on a subsequent page — that remains true here. But this ink is difficult to see regardless of circumstance. Out of all the papers I tested this ink on, it was without a doubt the most visible on Leuchtturm and the least visible on Tomoe River.
Ink Splat
Ink Droplets
Performance on paper:
Wendy Darling should work fine on most fountain pen-friendly papers. There wasn’t any visible bleed-through or feathering on any of my test pages, not even on Kokuyo. The dry times were great! Most of the nib sizes dried within 10 seconds, and at most 15. Shockingly, there wasn’t much in the way of water resistance. If you look closely you can almost see a trace that something was written, but it’s effectively unreadable.
Water resistance
Chromatography
Performance in the pen:
Wendy Darling has a dry flow, which was consistent across each of the test nibs. I didn’t experience any hard starts or clogs, but there were instances across all of the nibs where the ink failed to keep up with normal writing. It never led to a skip or a stop, but there were points where there was noticeably less ink coming from the pen and a short break was needed for the flow to catch up. The lubrication is okay initially, but as the flow slows down, it becomes noticeably draggy and uncomfortable. As expected, this ink washed out of the pen instantly, but the shimmer left behind a shimmery haze in the barrel of the pen and along the crown of the piston. This is easy to remove by scrubbing with a towel or cotton swab, but it requires the pen to be disassembled.
Performance in a pen: 6/10
Performance on paper: 10/10
Color saturation: 1/10
Sheening: 0/10
Shading: 8.5/10
Dry time: 9/10
Water resistance: 1/10
Ease of cleaning: 6/10
Shimmer: Yes
My personal thoughts...
There’s too light to be easily usable, and then there’s this. Why. Who’s this for? Sure, the inspiration for the color is clear, and the swatch itself looks great, but it’s like writing with shimmered residual inky water from a poorly cleaned nib. I dare to say it’s easier to see the shimmer than the ink itself. On second thought, perhaps the idea was to make an ink as invisible as Wendy was any time Peter had something else to entertain him. Nailed it. Maybe this is an ink that would be better suited in a dip pen to bring out all of its fine nuances…but it’s not a dip pen ink. I’m not even sure that I have a pen that’s broad and juicy enough to make anything of such a pale blue, but even if I did, that wouldn’t be practical. In fact, it’s so impractical, I’m not even bothering to ink up another pen for the writing sample. This one will get the test pen.
Written in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook with a TWSBI Diamond 580 (Broad) It’s easier to see the show-through from the previous page than it is to see Wendy Darling.
Other inks in this set:
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, and 1.1mm stub, 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 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook
A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook
A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook