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For professional illustration you cannot afford to mess around trying to find suitable materials - you have to know what works and be able to produce artwork without hardly thinking about the materials. I feel with my work commissions I am not looking to experiment - to some extent my illustrations need to come off a production line and need to work straight away. Tria Markers allow a very quick way of getting colour and tone down and can easily be blended.
Always get the best quality materials you can afford. I’ve tried cheaper alternatives and they affect the quality of the finished piece.
With markers they always need to be ‘wet’ i.e. no use skimping on or using old ones. If you restrict your palette you can replace ‘drying’ markers. You don’t necessarily need all the steps in a range.
I find the markers most used for all types of automotive illustration are the range of cool greys but in sequence; blender, cool grey 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and Black S.
This can give most industrial design renderings a full compliment of tonal shadows and surfacing and then only needs small areas of colour to finish off.
In the past I’ve used markers to produce spatter and blotch patterns and cotton pads soaked in marker for backgrounds and tonal compositions. These can often now be done in PhotoShop but the trouble with computer rendering is you can loose the ‘feel’ of a product; especially when creating a car or bike – it still needs to have a certain dynamism that a computer can dilute by being too rigid in the construction and operation of the programme.
When drawing a full colour illustration, add tone and reflection to your work by blending colours.
For example, doing a Ferrari with a selection of reds builds tone and reflection.
Most important of all – get so used to using markers that you don’t think about it but about the product you are designing, this will take time and practice, but stick to it. I find the key for my style of art is lots of blending followed by black pen detail and finished with coloured pencil for further detailing. For metal or smooth surfaces I will go over any pencil areas to smooth out the graininess - make sure you clean up the marker tip after this though, as they are contaminated by the coloured pencil.
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