Waterman Audacious Red
Ink Review # 56
*Please note that the scan is the accurate representation of this color.
Overview
The color/properties:
Waterman Audacious Red is a medium red. There’s some light shading with a soft cut where the ink pools, but there isn’t a high amount of tonal variation, and the shading areas are only slightly darker. To my surprise, when the droplets and ink splats dried, there was a green sheen. It looks great on this color and I wish that I had been able to get a slight sheen when writing with this ink, but there wasn’t any. It might be possible with some pen and paper combinations, but I wouldn’t expect this to occur under normal circumstances.
Ink Splat
Ink Droplets
Performance on paper:
Aside from some typical bleed-through on the Kokuyo paper, I didn’t experience any other detectable bleeding or feathering on the other papers. The dry times were slightly above average, with the large nib sizes usually drying within the 15-second mark, but a few instances where it extended to 20 seconds. There unfortunately wasn’t a lot of water resistance, and water exposure led to most of the color being washed away or too hazy to clearly make out.
Water resistance
Chromatography
Performance in the pen:
Audacious Red performed better than I thought it would! It has a dry-medium flow, and I expected there would be a lot of hard starting, but I didn’t experience any (there was one visible hard start with the broad nib on Tomoe River, but it was a user error). There was an adequate amount of lubrication: it wasn’t especially slick, but it was enough to make the writing experience comfortable. It only took a single flush to clear the ink out of the nib units during cleaning, but inside the pen, the ink left a red ring around the inside of the barrel. This mostly came out after letting the barrel soak with water over night, but the acrylic still had a red hue until the pen was disassembled so I could scrub it out.
Small note: this ink tends to crust up fairly quickly, especially around the bottle opening, and can leave dry ink flakes that can make a terrible mess.
Performance in a pen: 9.5/10
Performance on paper: 9/10
Color saturation: 6/10
Sheening: 1/10
Shading: 3.5/10
Dry time: 8/10
Water resistance: 1/10
Ease of cleaning: 7.5/10
Shimmer: None
My personal thoughts…
Waterman Audacious Red was an ink that I purchased early on in my fountain pen hobby. It was my first red, and I hated it. That hasn’t changed much, either — I still don’t care for it. The color simply doesn’t do anything for me. There’s something about it that just feels so bland. I’m always surprised to hear that someone loves this color, but to each their own, I suppose. It does work well, though. I genuinely started to enjoy it when it was in the needlepoint nib during my tests. There’s not much else I can say about it. It’s a red and it’s fine. I don’t love it, but you might.
Written in a Leuchtturm1917 notebook with an Esterbrook J (manifold fine)
More images/info:
Tools and materials used in the writing samples:
A TWSBI Diamond 580 AL with 7 nib units including a Needlepoint grind, EF, F, M, B, 1.1mm stub, and an Architect grind. All nibs are tuned to perform at the same medium wetness.
A Rhodia No16 A5 DotPad
A Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook
A 68gsm A5 Tomoe River Notebook
A Maruman Mnemosyne A5 Spiral Notebook
A Kokuyo Campus A5 Notebook