Starting off couple of goes on some fake skin. any comments criticisms whatever constructive feedback welcome.

xskycamefalling · 14 May 2023

ive got2 practice skins with this kit. more coming in the mail along with bags for my machine ink and a few more needle types. as well as more sanitary related items so i can start a legit routine.

any pointers you can give out? these skins are super thin i ended up stacking one on the other

whippet · 15 May 2023

Take as much time as you’d need to get your black fills solid, work methodically small section by small section. This is one area that shows up a lot in healed tattoos, as the lining saturates (let’s say) 100%, anything less in your adjacent fill will likely heal lighter and you’ll end up seeing the outlines when you don’t want to. You can see the fills are patchy in your black letters.

Test your linework on the skins by doing 3 things:

Run the back of your fingernail over the lines to see if you can feel the indent or incision….you shouldn’t be able to.

Turn the skins over and see if any of your lining is visible from the back, it shouldn’t be.

Stretch the skins across the lines to make sure the lines don’t open up or split.

Any of the negative effects above suggest you need to manage your depth and speed better. Skins won’t do everything for you but I believe they can help a lot with getting your lining on point.

Also, as a beginner, try to avoid smaller lining configs. 3s, 5s and 7s etc are pretty unforgiving in terms of smoothness, can blow out real easy and are potentially more damaging to human skin (and fake skins), especially cutting or slicing the skin if machine and hand speed are out. My personal recommendation is to start with #12 9s or 11s. If you’re lining properly, these sizes are not that chunky in the skin, but will give solid saturation and even line widths much easier than smaller groupings.

One other thing: Vaseline (petroleum jelly) is great for cleaning these skins, smear it on and wipe off with a clean paper towel, it seems to pick up all the pigment and remove it.

xskycamefalling · 15 May 2023

whippet said:
Take as much time as you’d need to get your black fills solid, work methodically small section by small section. This is one area that shows up a lot in healed tattoos, as the lining saturates (let’s say) 100%, anything less in your adjacent fill will likely heal lighter and you’ll end up seeing the outlines when you don’t want to. You can see the fills are patchy in your black letters.

Test your linework on the skins by doing 3 things:

Run the back of your fingernail over the lines to see if you can feel the indent or incision….you shouldn’t be able to.
Turn the skins over and see if any of your lining is visible from the back, it shouldn’t be.
Stretch the skins across the lines to make sure the lines don’t open up or split.

Any of the negative effects above suggest you need to manage your depth and speed better. Skins won’t do everything for you but I believe they can help a lot with getting your lining on point.

Also, as a beginner, try to avoid smaller lining configs. 3s, 5s and 7s etc are pretty unforgiving in terms of smoothness, can blow out real easy and are potentially more damaging to human skin (and fake skins), especially cutting or slicing the skin if machine and hand speed are out. My personal recommendation is to start with #12 9s or 11s. If you’re lining properly, these sizes are not that chunky in the skin, but will give solid saturation and even line widths much easier than smaller groupings.

One other thing: Vaseline (petroleum jelly) is great for cleaning these skins, smear it on and wipe off with a clean paper towel, it seems to pick up all the pigment and remove it.

Thanks for the info. At the time of doing this all's I had was 5rl 3rl and a 7m. Today I just got my order in though and with that larger liner configurations. First stab at it. I will utilize the info provided for the next skin and post results. With the lettering I was having trouble working the 7mag in the space dident wanna butcher it up so I just stopped. Somthing I have to get used to using the mags in small spaces or maybe utilizing a round shader for those smaller areas. Though from what my mentor tells me they can be a lot ruffer on the skin.
Anyway appreciate the advice! I think it will help when I get better skins as well the ones I have are super thin I'll have to post a pic.

whippet · 16 May 2023

Your mentor’s right on RS…I do use them when needed but I’ve learnt to go light and aim for one hit saturation, it’s the layering that does it, ‘burgers’ the skin. Good luck with your next attempts, look forward to seeing them

xskycamefalling · 17 May 2023

attempts # 5 i think now.
got a long way to go. new skins come tomorrow.

xskycamefalling · 20 May 2023

shading is still a problem for me. any pointers or any type of insight would b great. seems like im allways way to dark when i start off and then im all over the place splotchy nothing even

whippet · 20 May 2023

Hi and nice to see you’re still at it.

There’s a bit of patchy filling in to sort our BUT more importantly you need to aim for a greater range of tones, this is essentially 2, Black and mid grey. Maybe use a 4-6 cup drop system to get the tones ready maybe then you’ll be able to practise and evaluate your shading and blending techniques.

I’ve been tattooing a while now so I’m not trying to put you down ( I started exactly where you are) But I did a similar (plague doctor in my case) design myself as a B&G practise piece. I know there’s a lot of black but its the blends to white/skin that create the depth. I used a 4 cup drop system to do this.

Even when practising it’s important to keep looking at the reference and avoid imagining how the shading should be.

Big Pete · 20 May 2023

Your lining looks very good, but as Whippet has said, your shading needs more gradients. I have found that if I shade my lightest shade first I can always go darker whereas if you go dark first, you can't lighten it.
Also don't be scared to leave negative space instead of covering the whole space with shading to give the tattoo more of a 3D effect.

xskycamefalling · 20 May 2023

thank you both for the input. i will use your advice and try the drop method I'm not experienced enough to be doing this scale of things anyway i dont think just more of a see what will happen. i need to hone it back and work on smaller pieces and shading for a while until i get a better grasp using a mag so i can have better transitions.. also utilizing more tones as you both have said something i realized while i was doing it. learning slowly this will be the end of week one. again thanks for your comments and advice!

xskycamefalling · 21 May 2023

had this drying on the other side of the skull from yesterday.. free house on a weekend try and make use of the time where i can.. still having a hard time getting a light tone.. i used 1 drop of black and distilled water and bender shading is the result seems really dark.. thinking its more to do with my hand pressure at this point.. or ammount of time in area . anyway day 6 or 7 we will go with day 7. going to take the rest of the day to just work on drawing working through a few classes online. other then that figure out what my next project will be. as allways all criticism is welcome as this is a learning procress i would love to hear what i could do better or what im doing wrong. Thanks all.
i used a 5rl and 5rm both at 6.5v outline for both took about 25 min spent a little bit over an hour total between the two.

whippet · 21 May 2023

Wider mags will give you smoother fills and grads, including blending to light tones. A 5 curved mag may only have 3 needle tips in the skin at any one time, so its almost like shading with a liner or round shader, which is hard. Maybe around a 13 cm would be a good start

For mixing: I use a large cap (you can get s,m,l and xl at most place), a full black, 50%black, 25% black, 8 drops, 4 drops and then a cap with the dilutant, I use witch hazel but water will work (distilled if ur tattooing people).

getting soft light tones is partly the dilution of ink, but also the lightness of touch on the skin, and layering the tone up, not trying to put it all in one hit like solid black or a solid colour.

Think about the physics: With the same hand speed, a faster running machine will make the dots closer together (smoother) while a slow running machine will leave spaces between the dots (stipple shading). You can’t go too fast without traumatising and/or irritating the skin, so slowing your hand movement down with a medium speed will achieve the same as the fast speed…stay light on the surface.

Take a look at pendulum shading and whip shading techniques. Careful with whipping as you can create trauma at the point you’re whipping from, though there is a technique that kind of combines pendulum and whip, in which you ‘pendulum’ into your black edge and back out without stopping, one fluid movement.

Don’t beat yourself up if it’s taking time. Learning to draw is important, but it wont help you tattoo any better on its own…you need to keep working on your skins. Trust me if u put the work in you’ll get there..no one starts off as a great tattooist, or even a mediocre one.

It you fancy an exercise, try this. Draw 2 parallel lines on your skin, about 1cm apart and around 5cm long. Start at one end with solid black and aim to transition from black to nothing in the 5cm.

You’ll probably get banding when you first start but it’ll come. One trick is to fade out each tone and then start the next light tone before the fade starts in the previous tone, so your overlapping.

xskycamefalling · 22 May 2023

whippet said:
Wider mags will give you smoother fills and grads, including blending to light tones. A 5 curved mag may only have 3 needle tips in the skin at any one time, so its almost like shading with a liner or round shader, which is hard. Maybe around a 13 cm would be a good start

For mixing: I use a large cap (you can get s,m,l and xl at most place), a full black, 50%black, 25% black, 8 drops, 4 drops and then a cap with the dilutant, I use witch hazel but water will work (distilled if ur tattooing people).

getting soft light tones is partly the dilution of ink, but also the lightness of touch on the skin, and layering the tone up, not trying to put it all in one hit like solid black or a solid colour.

Think about the physics: With the same hand speed, a faster running machine will make the dots closer together (smoother) while a slow running machine will leave spaces between the dots (stipple shading). You can’t go too fast without traumatising and/or irritating the skin, so slowing your hand movement down with a medium speed will achieve the same as the fast speed…stay light on the surface.

Take a look at pendulum shading and whip shading techniques. Careful with whipping as you can create trauma at the point you’re whipping from, though there is a technique that kind of combines pendulum and whip, in which you ‘pendulum’ into your black edge and back out without stopping, one fluid movement.

Don’t beat yourself up if it’s taking time. Learning to draw is important, but it wont help you tattoo any better on its own…you need to keep working on your skins. Trust me if u put the work in you’ll get there..no one starts off as a great tattooist, or even a mediocre one.

It you fancy an exercise, try this. Draw 2 parallel lines on your skin, about 1cm apart and around 5cm long. Start at one end with solid black and aim to transition from black to nothing in the 5cm.

You’ll probably get banding when you first start but it’ll come. One trick is to fade out each tone and then start the next light tone before the fade starts in the previous tone, so your overlapping.

good idea with the parallel lines im going to give that a shot.! thanks

xskycamefalling · 23 May 2023

last of the cheap amazon fake skins. not too keen on using this brand really had to drill i=t in in comparison to the other fake skins i used.. seems like i woulda been tearing up skin. anyway i had it and the stencil was allready on it so i did it. Tonight im goign to work on shading betweeen the two lines like whippit suggested i will try and take a video to post or at least a picture of the final like i have been. anyway i know the fill is patchy in places as i felt like in real life i would have been chewing up someones skin. also any suggestions on removing a stencil after im done? the whole bottom you can see the smeared stencil and in other various places it still shows through.

whippet · 23 May 2023

Saturation looks pretty good to me, seems better than some of the earlier efforts. Good that you recognise that you can batter fake skin in a way that you can’t on human skin (or at least you shouldn’t). If you look across your skin so it’s almost at eye level, look for ‘pits’ in the surface (pitted), This suggests ‘trauma’ or overworking, and it is something else you can learn to regulate with decent fake skins. I always recommend reelskin as it has lots of ways to show you when you are doing the right or the wrong things.

Not sure anyone has worked out how to remove a well adhered stencil on fake (or pig) skin. Don’t worry about that too much, as what you ‘love’ today will be relegated to the bin tomorrow, as you continue to improve. It’’s useful to keep skins as a record of progress, either the skins or a photo, but ultimately they are just to serve a learning purpose.

xskycamefalling · 24 May 2023

well i did the line exercise as suggested def seemed to give me a little more clarity coming down to hand speed and pressure that and slowly layering i was just diving in to dark to start. something im going to attempt to keep working on before or after each time i pick up the machine to do anything. anyway day 10 in the books.. kinda let my line work slip up a little in this one although im somewhat happy with the shading. more so then in the past. just gunna keep trucking along and inking up these fake skins.. i may try a small tattoo on my leg friday as its a holiday weekend giving me time to take care of it properly after the fact. still up in the air on that but anyway todays product. thanks whippet for all the feedback i really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to give this poor sap some advice!

DKJ · 26 May 2023

xskycamefalling
Good workflow, we can see a lot of adjustements and you're growing.

Just a quick advice: you should work on your contrast.
If you compare the 2 plague doctors, you'll see that there's not always a need for long gradients.
The definitive eye-catcher is in how dark is your darkest dark, and how light is your lightest white.

Get some 'how to get better contrast illustration' results on google, you'll see what i mean.

For the moment you seem to be a little bit too shy, in greyish mode.

Peace, keep on the good work!

DKJ

xskycamefalling · 29 May 2023

so was a decent weekend. put up a new deck and did 3 tattoos 2 on reel skin one on my leg.

im limited to colors so i just mixed some brown and white and then orange and yellow. something i will invest in as time goes but for practice sake im not too concerned with getting more colors until i show myself some progression.

did all the blue on my leg with a 5rl fill and all.. used a 7m for pink after lining it. and i know no black but and nevermind that old ass monstrosity thats on my leg.. hopefully i can fix it to a degree one day.

two days after

day 3

xskycamefalling · 29 May 2023

messing around on Monday night before bedtime

xskycamefalling · 1 Jun 2023

thrusday night took a couple days off building that deck and the regular 8-5 kicked my ass this week. anyway

my colors def muddled together started with the blue and worked to the lighter colors shoulda used more Vaseline i guess

Starting off couple of goes on some fake skin. any comments criticisms whatever constructive feedback welcome.

xskycamefalling

whippet

xskycamefalling

whippet

xskycamefalling

xskycamefalling

whippet

Attachments

Big Pete

xskycamefalling

xskycamefalling

whippet

xskycamefalling

xskycamefalling

whippet

xskycamefalling

DKJ

xskycamefalling

xskycamefalling

xskycamefalling

Free Linework Secrets Guide