When I ordered the Stabilo Boss Nature Colors Set, I also grabbed the Kuretake Zig Clean Color Dot Mild Smoky (6-color set for $14.25). This set includes six, pastel/muted colors which is right up my alley right now.
These are the first Zig Clean Color Dot markers that I’ve gotten that are SINGLE tip. I didn’t even know there was an option for “just dots”. So, proceed with the knowledge that some Zig Clean Color Markers are double ended with a brush or dot tip on one end and a fineliner marker on the other and others are single ended with just one of those options. The more you know.
The tips of the Color Dot markers are round, bulbous, squishy tips. The firmer the tip is pressed, the larger the dot will be. With a light tap, you can create a small dot, with more pressure, the dot can be larger, almost large enough to fill a whole 5mm square on dot grid paper.
The colors are easter egg muted tones: 490 (grayish green), 407 (pale turquoise), 408 (pale moss), 602 (oatmeal), 201 (pale rose) and 805 (wisteria). Its a pretty palette of colors that are a little more like pastels rather than “nature” like the Stabilo Boss markers from yesterday.
Using these pens to create “dots” is a great way to create your checkboxes in a to do list. You can color code your tasks with the various colors. The tips are a bit too big and the colors a bit too pale to use these tips for writing (as you can see in the numbers written below). So, I wanted to try to figure out what else I could do with these.
The tip is wide enough to use as a highlighter for textbooks, books and magazines of course. I wanted to also test these with pens to see if I could highlight over ink. In my highlighting tests, I am sad to say that the quality of these markers was not great. Whatever ink formula the Zig Clean Color Dots use is not as gentle as the Stabilo Boss markers. Even with the felt/fiber tip fineliners, the ink smeared on my 68gsm Tomoe River paper. Of course, your results may vary depending on what paper you use. When compared directly to the Stabilo Boss markers, however, the Stabilo Boss performed much better on the 68gsm paper when highlighting over pens.
So, as much as I wanted to fall in love with the Clean Color Dot markers in Mild Smoky colors, I just didn’t. The smeariness was definitely a downside. The sort of one-purpose design was also a bit disappointing. Potentially, if I had gotten double-ended versions of these colors, I might have been a bit less disappointed since I could get more mileage out of the pens by using the fineliner end for other purposes. As it is, these Clean Color Dots are really only useful for… making dots.
Just to bring it all back around, I decided to do a color comparison between the Stabilo Boss NatureColors and the Zig Clean Color Dots Mild Smoky Set. There are definitely a few similar colors. The Clean Color Dots have a turquoise, pinky and purple shade but the other colors in the set are similar to the NatureColors.
When compared, I really think I prefer the Stabilo Boss NatureColors and I suspect I will use this set more often than the Zig Clean Color Dot Mild Smoky set. Which set do you like better?
Do you have other uses for the Dot tip? Maybe you can help me find a way to love these pens?
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by JetPens for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
