How To Shade An American Traditional Tattoo - The Rules For Shading Trad Tattoo Designs

[@Straylightt]

Thanks for another great tutorial! Well explained and nice tip explaining that traditional doesn't always follow lighting rules

[@thetechietattooer]

Thanks for the watch and comment. I’m glad you found some interesting info in it, and do let me know if there are any topics you would like me to cover in the future. Viewer feedback is the best way for me to make sure I am creating the content you all want to watch!

[@Straylightt]

In terms of making artwork, if you did a video explaining sketching an idea in Procreate and then transitioning over to Adobe Fresco to vectorize. For tattoo machines I recently picked up a Pope Irons T3 rotary hybrid machine and a 3D printed Coffin tattoo rotary machine from Electric Soul Tattoo machines. Would be nice to see a video going over non-tradtional machines and how they compare and/or thoughts. And it would be great if you could record one of your tattoo sessions and walk through your thought process in real time. Just some ideas

[@thetechietattooer]

@@Straylightt those are great ideas. Thank you. I’ll have to look into adobe fresco. I’ve actually never used it before. But I have done a lot of converting art to vector graphics, so that’s right up my alley. I got away from all the adobe products years ago when they switched to a subscription model, so it’s been a minute. lol But those other two ideas I can totally go through. Thanks for the suggestions 🤘

[@thetechietattooer]

@straylightt I looked into it, and adobe fresco does not have a function for turning pixel art into vector art. Adobe Illustrator has a “image trace” function that will do what you are asking, but Fresco does not. The only option with Fresco is to use vector brushes to manually trace over your imported/existing pixel art.

[@Straylightt]

@@thetechietattooer Yes I ran into that the first time I tried Fresco too. Cool thing about Fresco is you can have rasterized and vector ones in the same document. I follow some artist like Ten Hundred on YT and he sketches in Procreate and does the render in Fresco. He does a lot of digital art for mercg though and not tattooing. I have a ton of Procreate brush packs so I'm not going to fully transition to Fresco yet. Thanks for looking into it!

[@XCE55IVE]

Great vid man!

[@thetechietattooer]

Thank you! And thanks for commenting and spending the time to give it a watch. Much appreciated

[@Pfeish]

Great video! I’d love to see a video about how to create flash that doesn’t look stiff or like it doesn’t fit/belong on the body

[@thetechietattooer]

Glad you got some use out of it. So I love the abstract idea of what you are talking about for a flash concept video. But do you have sort of a specific tattoo style in mind? American Trad is designed stiff as a stylistic choice. That specific style is meant to be that way and assembled on the body in a patchwork style that often has very little planning or consideration for the body part on which it will be applied. That is either a drawback or a “feature” depending on your personal aesthetic preferences. But I do understand what you are saying and would love to do a video about flash tattoos that are designed for specific areas of the body. But can you be a little more specific about a particular style you would like me to dive into?

[@tattoochance]

Rule 1. Take out the light source Rule 2. 1/3 black 1/3 color and 1/3 skin Rule 3. Put your black where you want just don’t let your blacks touch each other. Traditional tattoos came out of a necessity to get as many people in your chair as possible it was fast and simple.

[@thetechietattooer]

For sure. They used to have assembly lines where the one guy would do outlines, the next would do black, and the last would do color… no switching needles or inks 🤢 it was a crazy time. The only edit I might make to that rule break down is the third bullet point. When adding black, it does need to support the idea of shading the areas that should be pushed back or go behind other areas, and that skin breaks should be in the areas that need to be brought forward. But other than that that’s a great breakdown of the video. Thanks for watching and the solid summary 🤘

[@tattoochance]

@ if you take out the light source “rule one” there’s no push or pull. No need to think about what’s in front or behind. Keep it simple.

[@thetechietattooer]

@@tattoochance but we need to keep in mind that the light source isn’t the only rule at play when considering how to shade the design. By removing the idea of light source, we are upping the precedence of the topography of the design overall as well as specific individual elements of the design. Each element will then have its own shape(s) accentuated by the shading applied to it, so the shading must adhere to/accentuate the peaks and valleys of each element and the design overall.