Brittle Wings

Okay, here it is! Finally, my review of Tria markers by Letraset. Remember this ain’t a be-all-end-all, it’s just my own personal opinions and my experience of using them so far:

Shonen 24 Set

The set I ordered contains 24 “carefully selected” pens aimed at creating shonen-style manga art. I actually wanted to use them for creating flash, so I chose them due to the vibrancy of the colours (the others seems paler in comparison, and I like nice bright colours in flash). I touched on the lack of certain colours yesterday, but I’ll go into it in detail further down.

Delivery and first experience

Service from Letraset was good as always. I ordered my pens (along with some paper, nibs and a replacement fineliner as I had binned the last one and wanted to see if working with Tria as opposed to Pro made any difference), they arrived promptly on Tuesday via 1st Class post (Letraset even included a money off voucher for my next purchase).

I ripped them free of the box and immediately started doing colour swatches on my A4 Daler Rowney bleedproof pad. For the first few moments I thought “Wow! The colour is really bright!” but then when I went to blend some pink and red, I discovered that there was a complete lack of suitable pen for this purpose.

“Why didn’t you buy the blender?” I hear you shout, along with “Well, you chose that set and you seen the colour swatches before you bought it, it’s your fault!”

Okay, so maybe part of it is my fault, but the fact remains that the 24 pen sets are packaged as “all you need to create blah blah blah”, whether it’s the fashion set or one of the “manga comic art” ones. They most certainly do not contain all you need. The shonen set lacks grey (instead of giving me four very similar blues, they could have supplied one less and replaced it with a darker, petrol blue or a grey suitable for blending). I don’t really see why I should buy the blender seperately if you can’t use the pens how you want it without it. Again, instead of giving me so many of the brown/grey shades, give me a blender! Or give me a ligher yellow or green I can overlay with!

Okay, so still is mostly my own fault, but still. C’mon. You can’t just grab the set and create fantastic looking artwork with it as it does not contain the right balance of colours as far as I’m concerned. And I thought I was being smart getting the most vibrant looking set!

More experiences

I put the fact that I don’t have a blender (I have my ProMarker one, but it don’t work so well neither it do) or suitable overlay colours aside and though “Right, no matter! I’ll just have to make flash with shit loads of blue and brown in them”. So I started doing some rough pencil and ink sketches on the Letraset bleedproof marker pad I got the other day in town. I decided to give the fineliner one more try, seeing as I was using Letraset paper, Letraset markers and nothing could possibly go wrong.

How wrong was I. And this was after at least one minute of drying time (I also don’t like the bleed you get out of the fineliner):

Letraset claim (and I quote) “They provide smooth, accurate performance and can be used for outlining and detailing your marker work without bleeding into the marker”. Yeah, they might not “bleed” in the normal sense of the word, but they smudge everywhere as soon as they come into contact with one of the markers and completely ruin your artwork.

I think what’s annoying me the most about Tria is that now that I’m working with them, I’m noticing practically no difference whatsoever between them and the much lower priced ProMarkers.

Compare:

The one on the left is Pro, the one on the right, Tria. Now, is it just me or is there really not much of a difference between the two? So little in fact, that I’m getting quite angry that I spent so much on a set of markers which are really exactly the same as the cheap ones I’ve had for months. Right, there’s a bit of a difference, but is it worth the price gap? I think that’s the pivotal point of this review: that I don’t feel there is a markable (heh, see what I did there?) difference between the two pens to warrant the cost.

Woteva

As I’ve already mentioned, this is my own experience of using the pens, but I would seriously consider buying the cheaper ProMarkers to start with if you are new to markers. I really don’t think I’ll be using them much again, which is disappointing if nothing else, especially with all the hype around them. Digital colouring wears a bit thin after a while (plus, it’s so clean and I like to get my hands dirty!).