cimorene

Private Reserve Avocado fountain pen ink with Lamy Safari B and Speedball C-2 italic and Hunt school nib, plus water and paintbrush.

This is a lovely warm spinachy green that produces a lot of shading in a juicy nib like the Lamy B above.

As noted in the image, it’s been spelled “Avacado” all over the internet, which I acknowledge and herewith ignore.

It has a jungley brilliance which, however, is not particularly similar, as it lightens out, to its (presumed) fruit namesake, which tends to be a chartreusey yellow inside and darken to a warmer green. Perhaps the name is an allusion to the outer skin of the avocado, but this color seems too light and not sufficiently brown there for me.

An interesting commonality with the grey-green “Olive” ink by L’Artisan Pastellier is the way the ink behaves when washed over with water. The blue-greens in both inks thinned out willingly and easily into a whole spectrum all the way to the lightest and most delicate mint, but they both left behind traces of rusty/orange/brown tones that had perhaps dried faster or bonded already to the paper. Obviously in the case of this ink, there was more of the browny/orangey tone than the other, and hence the line beside the mouth of my drawing up there and another bit of orange in her hair. There’s definitely something about ink chemistry to research there that I haven’t read up on yet.

This ink was part of my quest for a dark green ink that wouldn’t suggest Crayola but would still appear green, not nearly black, at a glance. I feel that Diamine Classic Green and Diamine Evergreen, as well as a lot of writing samples I’ve seen online in reviews, fall into that group. I like the appearance here with the Lamy B nib, but in a fine or extra fine nib, this ink looks much more similar to Classic Green and the shading is less apparent. I prefer writing with fine (Asian) or extra fine (Kaweco, Lamy, Shaeffer) nibs, so I’m not entirely sold on this ink.

A sample on Rhodia dotpad: