As a person with an ink collection that could politely be described as ‘substantial’ you wouldn’t think that there would be much on the market that I would want to add to it.
However, you would be wrong; it seems everywhere I turn there is a new colour that I always manage to convince myself deserves a place in the collection and when , on the whole, ink is inexpensive compared to pens it doesn’t take much to convince me and so it was with Diamine Red Dragon.
What attracted me to Red Dragon was the colour, now I have many red inks in the collection but not many that are what you would call a true deep red so when I saw Red Dragon, I ordered a bottle to try.
The thing about Diamine inks is not only are they very good quality they are also very affordable; at £5.90GBP for an 80ml bottle you can afford to try several colours, needless to say I never order just one bottle.
When it comes to red inks my reference points are Mont Blanc Corn Poppy Red for bright reds and Mont Blanc William Shakespeare for the deep reds; sadly both of these inks are out of production so I’m always on the lookout for inks that will serve as replacements for when my stocks finally run out.
So, what is Red Dragon like? Well, I’ve been using it regularly for a few weeks and I can honestly say I really like this red, it has a nice depth of colour and it is well behaved.
I have it loaded in a Platinum 3776 with a Broad nib and the flow has been very consistent with no skipping or hard starts and I have not been able to cause either by leaving the pen uncapped for several minutes.
Text sample.
This ink test was done in a new Seawhite Eco Sketchbook produced using Cup Cycling (the recycling of used takeaway coffee cups).
Ink test.
The Q-Tip swatch test produced an even, well saturated, block of colour and the stripe simply increased the density of the colour with each pass but did not reveal any sheen. The text test produced evenly coloured text which took rather longer to fully dry on this paper than I have been experiencing on other papers.
If you are looking for a nice deep red I would recommend you try Red Dragon; having used it for a few weeks I have been very pleased with it and it will be remaining as one of my regular inks for some time to come.
Disclaimer: The ink was purchased with my own funds at retail price. The opinions expressed in this review are my own; and I am not connected with either the retailers or manufacturers in any way.
The Indian Marmalade Company 