BlueBlack x Diamine - Light Under Waterloo 3
Light Under Waterloo 3 is the final and darkest of the three inks in the Waterloo Bridge set from the BlueBlack Pen Shop and Diamine. This is a nice, beautifully presented set (like all three sets in the Art Collection series), but I would have preferred a little more variety in color, like the other two sets. Diamine isn’t known for dual-shading inks, but Monet paintings are a natural inspiration for soft, gentle multicolored inks. That said, these are three very nice inks in the blue to violet range of the color spectrum.
While the first two were firmly blues, Light Under Waterloo 3 moves beyond and brings elements of violet to the dark blue that set it apart in the set. The ink splatter and swatches show the violet influences best in lighter areas. In writing, your results vary based on the paper style you choose, but overall I found the darker blues were most prevalent. You can also see some sheen in the macro below, but I didn’t get much in writing.
This is a strong color on the page, and I think it will be a very popular writing ink. There’s actually more shading than I expected on both coated and uncoated papers, and more than comes across in my writing samples below. I wouldn’t call it a shading ink, but in a page of text you see shading on each word. It’s a very blueberry dark blue violet.
The writing experience was excellent! It’s beautiful in use with no feathering and only moderate ghosting. In an ink this dark and rich in color, I expected more show-through and bleed, and was pleasantly surprised with the results on decent papers. Drying was fast on uncoated and faster than average on coated papers. Diamine inks are almost always nice writing inks!
All of the Art Collection sets are available at BlueBlack’s beautiful shop in Seoul, through their website, or on international shopping site GMarket Global (for inexpensive US shipping cost choose “USPS” for your shipping method). You can also find them at PenGallery in Malaysia.
Keep scrolling down for the swatch card, swatch comparisons, the bottles, and the packaged set.
Special thanks to BlueBlack for sending me these inks as a surprise gift! As usual, my reviews reflect my honest opinions, and I always include both the good and bad based on my experience using the ink.