Sun-Star Dot e Pen Review: Real Life Pixel Art Made Easy

Last week, I found myself staring at a tiny 8-bit Mario I'd just stamped into my notebook margin during a product planning meeting. The Dot e Pixel Art Pen from Sun-Star had been sitting on my desk for three months, and I'd finally started using it the way it was meant to be used. Not as a glorified checkbox marker, but for what its square tip was really designed for: recreating the chunky, nostalgic aesthetic of early video games.

Here's what you're getting: a double-sided marker with a 0.5mm fineliner on one end and a 3mm square felt tip on the other. That square tip is the whole point. Instead of drawing with it like a normal marker, you're meant to press it down like a rubber stamp. Each press creates a perfect 3x3mm square of color, and when you line them up on grid paper, you can build pixel art one dot at a time.

The body is plastic (polypropylene and polyethylene, with a stainless steel tip holder on the fineliner side), and the ink is water-based dye. Nothing fancy about the construction, but it doesn't need to be. This is a tool with one specific job.

I tested the Dot e Pen primarily in my Midori MD notebook, on Tomoe River paper in a Hobonichi Techo, and on standard grid notebooks from Maruman. The results varied enough to matter.

On Tomoe River, the square stamp bleeds through noticeably. You can see a ghost of every square on the reverse side, which makes it unusable if you write on both sides of the page. One user review I came across mentioned the same issue with their Jibun Techo. The MD notebook handled it better, with minimal show-through, though you can still detect the squares if you hold the page up to light.

The fineliner tip, though, performs consistently across all papers. The 0.5mm line is clean, the metal-barreled tip gives it some durability, and the ink dries quickly without feathering. I've been using the black one to outline pixel designs and write labels, and it hasn't shown any signs of drying out after six weeks of regular use.

Before the Dot e Pixel Art Pen, if you wanted to make pixel art in a notebook, you'd fill in grid squares with colored pencils or markers. Kuretake makes a competing product called the Clean Color Dot marker with a round dot tip. Zebra has the Mildliner Dot and Stamp series with shape stamps. But none of them commit to the square format quite like Sun-Star does here.

The square makes alignment effortless. On 5mm grid paper, one press fills one grid square perfectly. You don't have to think about spacing or worry about circles overlapping weirdly at the edges. The stamp-style application also means you can work quickly. I made a small Space Invaders alien in about 45 seconds, which would've taken three times as long with pencils.

For bullet journaling, the square works as a checkbox that's already filled in. I've been using the mint and light blue pens to mark completed tasks, and the visual weight of the solid square gives you that hit of satisfaction when you stamp it down. It's more deliberate than just checking a box.

The bleed-through issue is real and limits which notebooks you can use. If you stick to thicker paper (60gsm or higher), you'll be fine, but that rules out popular thin-paper planners unless you're okay with show-through.

The square tip deposits a lot of ink. If you press too hard or hold the stamp down too long, you get a blob instead of a crisp square. The trick is a quick, light tap. It took me about 20 stamps to get the pressure right, and even now I occasionally mess one up.

The color range is broad (16 options), but several reviewers, myself included, wish there were more mid-tones. The green is quite dark, and the jump to neon green is too extreme. A sage green or olive would slot in nicely between them.

Also, these pens have no date code or indicator for when the ink might dry out. The water-based formula means they'll eventually dry if you leave them uncapped, and the square tip seems particularly vulnerable since it has more surface area exposed to air.