@AnasaziWrites - make sure to shake the bottle vigorously to get the shimmer particles into suspension. They actually fall to the bottom of the bottle really fast, so I'm always recapping and shaking them up more - but sometimes I leave them at the bottom too, depending on the effect I want.
Sometimes with high-shading inks like this, I use a blunt syringe and add a tiny drop of water (or fountain pen ink dilution fluid - it's just fountain pen ink medium without any dye) to the underside of the nib as the ink starts to run out, so I get an ombre effect as I write. You can also write with more or less pure water or dilution fluid (broad edge / automatic pen) and then use an eye dropper to add the ink so it swirls around on the letters. If you add two colors from opposite directions, they'll blend together in the middle!
When you use them in fountain pens, the feed meters out the ink flow so that they're less concentrated on the page. I think it will look more blue and less black in an actual fountain pen. But you'd probably need a fountain pen with a medium or broad nib (or a calligraphy nib) to really see the shading. IMHO, these are much more fun to use as an art medium than in a pen.
@Gary - that's very sweet of you. We're all our own worst critics, aren't we? But you have to admit that it is the objectively worst drawing I've put up in the series so far.
@Erica McPhee - I think these little bottles start circulating on eBay as people get rid of the colors they don't love and try to hoard the ones they do. You could probably find a little bottle of Stargazer to play with, if you don't want to wait until Diamine releases them in full size bottles. I don't think it'd make a good ink for writing cheques though - it's quite water-soluble, even thought it's very saturated.
And now onto....
"Night Shade" - A beautiful, medium violet-blue "standard" ink, with gorgeous chromatography, bleeding out lilac, dove grey, bright cyan, and robin's egg blue. Neon white-gold reaction to bleach, and good for writing straight out of the bottle. This ink appears to be the blue-violet sibling to red-violet "Harmony" (from earlier in the series). I've put an image of the two test swatches side by side so that you can see the family resemblance.
Now I admit that upon hearing the name of the ink, my first impulse for a drawing was going to be a picture of the very fierce Regina King in her roll as "Sister Night / Angela Abar" in the
Watchmen TV series. But then the color on the test swatch was so pretty and so delicate.... and it harmonized with "Harmony" so well....
I don't expect very many people will know about Hazel Scott (1920-1981) - but she was one of the all time great jazz pianists. A child prodigy! She played with Mingus, with Billy Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, with Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway and Count Basie. She headlined at New York's Café Society (sometimes called the first proper nightclub in America) and she played at Carnegie Hall. She had her own TV show (I think she was the first black woman to have her own TV show!). Her 1957 album "'Round Midnight" is essential, and brings me to the prompt, "Night Shade."
She was a civil-rights activist too! In the end, House Un-American Activities Committee canceled her show and did in her career - unjustly, as with so many others. She went to France for 10 years, and died way too young, in 1981.