These delightfully cheap retro pens are the art world's best-kept secret. Once you've tried LePen, it's hard to use anything else.

The marvellous Marvy Uchida LePen pens come in a delightful array of colours and are a delight to use. With an ultra-thin 0.3mm fineliner tip, they offer unrivalled accuracy, and they're also incredibly light. At $17.50 for a pack of 12, these are $1.48 per pen. Which, when you consider that some of the most beautiful pens cost thousands, is nothing short of a steal.

The Marvy Uchida LePen features a smooth micro-fine plastic tip for precise, controlled writing. Its quick-drying, smear-resistant, water-based dye ink delivers vivid colour and works well on thin paper. With a lightweight, sleek barrel and a wide range of colours, it's ideal for journaling, planners, lettering, scrapbooking and everyday writing.

When I attended Figma's Config conference in San Francisco last year, I was surprised to hear Spike Jonze wax lyrical about Marvy Uchida's range of LePen pens. In 2026, it can feel like we're living in Spike Jonze's universe. The film director's 2013 hit, Her, imagined a world in which people form emotional bonds with AI – a world which, in the age of ChatGPT et al, doesn't feel quite so futuristic. And now, if you want to feel even more immersed in Jonze's world, you can use his favourite pen!

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