Mecha Sketch and Letraset Tria Markers

Letraset was nice enough to send me a free set of their new Tria markers for me to play with. Thanks Letraset!!! Sadly, that was in mid May and I just now had the time to do anything with them. You can probably tell from my lack of posts that I have been super busy.

The Tria carrying case. VERY nice quality! Yesterday I finally made myself start a drawing. Of course I wanted to draw a mecha because it has been ages since I got to do anything for myself, but I seemed to be missing any inspiration :( So I turned to my toy case and saw the Super Sylph jet from the anime Yukikaze... WOW, what a beautiful design. I decided to use that jet as my inspiration and draw both shapes and colors from it. See the toy here... SUPER SYLPH

I was given my choice of any set from the catalog so I chose Modern Fashion because the colors looked just right for my style. I was sent sent the "regular" fashion set which is quite a bit different and didn't have all the colors I wanted. I was disappointed but I understand how easy it is to make this sort of mistake so I didn't bother telling them about it. I did need some of the missing colors so I ordered a few more marker from Blick art materials (formerly Dick Blick). Blick offers everything at a good discount so I get all of my supplies from them via online ordering. The original set came with a catalog with pretty accurate color swatches for all of the markers. I use dhte catalog to select my colors instead of the Blick online swatches because they were very inaccurate.


The Tria use a unique triple tip system where one end is a "brush" tip and the other end has a chisel and fine point tip. I usually use Copic art markers so I dug those out and did a comparison. I prefer the brush tip on the Copic markers because they are a little softer and return to their original shape immediate. The Tria would stay bent from drawing and you had to manually bend them back . I was pretty put off by this at first but it didn't turn out to be an issue and I got used to it quickly. The Tria were otherwise equal with the Copic markers. One final difference is that the Tri have replaceable ink cartridges and you can easily buy any of the markers individually. Copic markers cost more and can only be bought in sets (at least that was true the last time I bought some).

The Tria system. The brush tip after a single stroke.
Finally, here is the mecha I drew using Micron pens and coloring it with the Tria markers. I took incremental photos as I worked. I need to create a few more pieces and then contact Letraset and let them know that I finally made something. They will probably post the work on their "Manga Artists" site. I'll post all the photos with notes to my blog if they are OK with it. Oh yeah, this drawing took me a total of about 5 hours from start to finish. I was really rusty !!!