Rhodia dotPad Notepad

Rhodia built the dotPad for fountain-pen people, which is exactly why it’s so good for plotting fineliner work. The paper is genuinely smooth, the ink sits cleanly on top instead of wicking into the fibers, and the faint dot grid happens to be one of the more useful alignment aids you can put under a pen plotter.

How it takes ink

At 80gsm the dotPad is light, but the surface is the headline. It’s slick enough that a 0.3 mm pigment liner draws a clean, sharp line with no visible feathering — the ink doesn’t crawl outward along the paper grain the way it does on cheaper sketch stock. Drying is quick, so retraced lines and tightly packed hatching don’t smear if your plotter doubles back. The smoothness is also kind to your pen tips: there’s almost no tooth to abrade a felt or plastic nib over a long run.

The dot grid is the real trick

Most paper makes you guess where your drawing sits relative to the sheet. The 5 mm dot grid gives you a printed reference to square the page against your plotter’s axes, so your art lands straight and centered without trial-and-error. It’s faint enough not to dominate a scan, but if you’re plotting work you’ll photograph or sell, plot on a blank sheet and keep the dotPad for proofing.

Where the light weight bites

This is a test-and-proof paper, not a final-output paper for heavy work. Dump a lot of ink onto 80gsm — dense fills, solid hatching, big looping fields — and it cockles into gentle ripples. Those ripples change the pen-to-paper distance and can show up as uneven line weight. Tape all four edges down flat and keep coverage modest and it holds fine. For anything ink-heavy you mean to keep, step up to a heavier bristol and let the dotPad do what it’s best at: cheap, crisp proofs.