Tria Markers for Beginners

Hi there!

I hope you've all had a great week. I've been busy with the new Tria Markers I received from Katherine at Scrap Everything! They're very much like Copic Markers, but have some distinct differences.

Tria markers are alcohol ink based markers, perfect for colouring stamped images. A feature that separates them from the crowd is that you can produce darker and lighter hues of one colour all with the same pen. The more times you go over a coloured area, the darker it becomes. The advantage to this is that you only have to buy one pen to get all the shades of that colour you will need.

Here's what they look like - sorry about the low quality pic!

Another special feature is that they have 3 tips. One of the tips cleverly screws onto another. I'm not quite sure how the flow of ink works but work it does! There is a chisel tip, a medium tip and a very fine one for getting into those tricky places.

For those of you who have never tried them, here's Heather's Tria Markers for Beginners Tutorial:

1. Stamp your image with Memento ink. Any other ink will cause the image to bleed. You must stamp onto blending paper such as X Pressit brand for the alcohol inks to work properly - that is, blend and layer without bleeding.

2. Think about what direction you want the light in your image to appear to come from. You can use the marker to create shadows to give a more life-like look to your image.

3. Start with the lightest colours first. That way if you make a mistake you can hide it with the darker colour. Leave a faint line of white on the side the "light" is coming from to accentuate this. Colour in the remainder of that section with smooth strokes. It's best to use long, even strokes that cover the length of the section you are working on than shorter ones that overlap and leave marks. Here's my first layer on the face of a stamped image:

Note that you can see the stroke marks on this. These will fade as the image dries. See the white line I left on the right side? The"light" is coming from that direction.

4. Continue to colour your first layer across your whole image.

Notice how the stroke lines are fading on the boy's face.

5. Now add a second layer, keeping in mind that you are starting to create "shadows". I coloured about 3/4 of the boy's face and hair again. You can also darken areas to add contrast, for example to add more detail to clothing. Here's mine:

6. Now add a darker line down the side opposite the light source and add more shadows where required. Here's my final image:

I took this pic as soon as I finished the picture which is why you can still see stroke marks. They have definitely gone now!

These images are great for cardmaking but I wondered how I could incorporate them into my scrapping. I coloured another image, cut it out and used it as a scrapping embellishment. I think it worked really well!

Here's my layout:

That little fairy girl is gorgeous. Here's a close up of her:

You can see the contrasting colour around the hem of her dress. All the pink is just from the one pen. I adhered her to the journalling block then left her wings unattached. This made them stand up on the paper.

Off the subjects of the Tria Markers for a moment, I loooovvee the combination of that pink, peach and white laces. I'll be using that again.

I continued with the haberdashery theme by adding some embroidered flowers and leaves. My mum picks this sort of thing up at garage sales and they're always fantastic finds. I go rummaging through a bag of stuff she brings me and I never know what I'll find!

So if you're interested in giving the Tria Markers a go, you can find them here. If you would like more info, check out www.letraset.com where you can find some tutorials. Of course, good old you tube has tutorials too.

Hope you have fun playing!

Heather