I bought a couple of samples of Diamine greenish blacks after failing to get some Noodler’s Zhivago. This is Diamine Evergreen:

This wasn’t the olive colour I’d been looking for, but I was pleasantly surprised. My amateur colour chromatogram showed a fairly pure blue and yellow.

The nice people at Diamine slipped some free cartridges in my parcel, so I also got to try out Emerald, and will be trying Midnight and Chocolate in the future.

This is Emerald:

And this is the chromatogram:

Mmm… shades of purple and turquoise. Interesting.

Overall neither inks are particularly water resistant. But they’re nice inks, not the confrontational sort of green favoured by Outraged of Chiddingstone. Evergreen shows very good contrast on white paper, and Emerald shades nicely.

Just for fun I compared four greens side by side:

That’s Emerald, Meadow, Graphite and Evergreen together. The interesting thing is that Evergreen goes through a colour change over 24 hours, losing a lot of its blue.

Just written on the left, 24 hrs dry on the right. Not a subtle change with the swabs but if you’re writing a fine line it will look grey-black immediately but the green will come through later when you go back to your notes.

The other two I compared are Graphite and Meadow. The former is a grey ink but it has a very strong green undertone and it shades a bit–probably about as exciting as grey-black ink gets. Meadow is the colour of grass, but not quite as yellow as some of their other offerings. I don’t care for the swabs but the actual writing is quite nice with a wet writer. It works for annotations and hilighting.