Water based marker pens?

Does anyone know of any water or non-spirit based marker pens available (and not too expensive) in the UK?

I ask as I’m working with a group of people that can’t be trusted to use any materials they could use to get high (substance abuse) and am hoping to teach them some basic marker pen skills.

Also, any good tutorials for beginners? This isn’t as advanced as university level.

Thanks

Crayola? Not the best for rendering, but better than nothing I suppose. Or maybe go oldschool with watercolors. I believe there are also some type of watercolor pencils you can use that you blend with a “water marker”.

or skip marker skills and try conte/pastels or even pencil crayons. Either will teach the same color/values/bending skills.

R

It seems as though you’ve found yourself between a rock and a hard place with this one, but your desire to push forward with it is awesome. I think R has the best point. Maybe just focus on essential sketching building blocks such as perspective, form, drawing through, and overlay/underlays, then add value, shadows, etc. Perhaps you could do a “demo” with copics on an overhead to demonstrate how blending can be someday achieved in their now-awesome-linework. There’s always photoshop?

The design director where I work insists on using watercolors for his process-sketches in order to “feel the energy of the design”. (on a side note, as much as I love the guy, there is a hellovalota illustrator cleanup work for techpacks, etc.) Maybe you could show a different way of rendering that encourages more ‘fluidity’ in the ideation process by using watercolors as oppossed to stinky things?

For tutorials, I always turn people to www.idsketching.com to keep it simple.

I found that letraset do a small range of water based marker pens: http://www.letraset.com/products/30-AquaMarker-12-Packs/

no greys though. What do you guys think? I’ve not used anything water-based for rendering before, is it very different?