A This Cute Life Post

I don’t use gel pens often anymore. Once I fell down that fountain pen rabbit hole I became settled into Wonderland and made it my new home. But for many years, I was obsessed with building pen color palettes. This is my pastel pen palette.

*Sun-Star Delde Slide Pen Pouch in Girly Lilac*

First, came the Sun-Star Delde Slide Pen Pouch. It sat in my wish list for months. I finally decided to treat myself and once I saw it in person, I knew my next goal was to build a palette around it.I haven’t had the best experience with pastel pens. The set I bought a couple of years ago ended up in the wastebasket. Cute, but worthless. When I wasn’t fighting with the pen to get the ink out it was blotting everywhere. It pained me. The colors were adorable. But what’s the use of adorable colors when they won’t write?

The pastel set of Juice Up from Pilot promised a new experience with pastel pens. Better formulated ink that writes like normal gel pens. Some sort of revolutionary barrel design that promised to keep the ink flowing until it ran out. You know, marketing stuff.

The only thing that kept me from buying them was the limited palette. The other pastel set on my radar, Sarasa Milk, had more colors for about the same price. Unlike the Juice Up, there wasn’t any sort of marketing filled with an engineer’s accomplishments. But they looked cute in the package, and well, who wouldn’t want extra pens?

*Sarasa Milk pen set (not pictured – white color)*

We know how this ends.

I bought both packages.

To round out the pastel set, I picked up three of the four Mildliner highlighter sets. I use the highlighters to create headers, dividers, and color in my notebooks. There are four sets available, but the fourth is hard to find on American shores. I have the fourth set ordered, but it has to come all the way from South Korea!

pastel pen palette — *Pilot Juice Up writing test on Rhodia Webnotebook paper*

Though both pen sets performed splendidly on my Rhodia Webnotebook, when I tried the Pilot Juice Up on varieties of normal paper it still wrote perfectly. Their precise tips give a nice, clean, feel to your writing. The grips are comfortable enough to use for extended writing. The pen bodies themselves are rather light. While this can make them feel cheap, it also makes extended periods of writing easier.

The Sarasa Milk performed well on high-quality paper such as Rhodia, Midori, and Tomoe River, but were scratchy messes on normal paper. I spent many a scrap paper trying to scribble the ink out, only to have it scratch and skip once I tried to write on the real paper. The pens look a lot cuter than the Juice up by virtue of seeing the colors in their barrels. The pens feel heavier than the Juice Up, but are still comfortable to hold. Their slightly heavier weight will fatigue you a tad faster than the Juice Up, but not enough to definitively hold it against these pens. Their greatest sin is their inconsistency.

Pastel Pen Palette

Pilot Juice Up pastel set (amazon || jetpens)
Sarasa Milk set (amazon || jetpens)
Zebra Mildliner in Florescent, Cool, and Warm (amazon || jetpens)

These fit perfectly in the Delde pen pouch. What I adore about this pouch is that the slide down mechanism lets you see all your pens at once without having them spread out all over the table. For someone like me who uses 1,000 pens at once, this is key to having a neat workspace (and as a bonus, helps keep the cats from knocking them to the floor!)

I enjoy using this palette, but I think I’m going to find another set of pastel pens to round it out. I’ll probably remove the Warm set of Mildliners when I do so. I removed the brown Mildliner from the Warm set because it didn’t mesh with them, and the other Warm colors are just on the edge of looking okay, but not fantastic or perfect.

If you can only afford one set of pens, I recommend the Juice Up. The florescent Mildliners are about the same as normal florescent highlighters you can find in the store. Their color is softer, but it’s not so far off that you can get those instead. Of the Mildliner sets, the Cool is my favorite with the unique gray that enhances any palette set and the violet that goes well with the pen colors in this set.

As for my favorite color… well, it’s obvious I am partial to Lilac shades!

Extra! Cute Bonus Round!

Autumn, known as A. D. Perales, is an author of young adult novels specializing in space opera and urban fantasy. When she’s not fending off her four cats, she’s writing, baking, or working on her blog. You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram.