Today let us talk about portraits and other tattoos that are
black and grey. What is a black and grey tattoo anyway? Well, obviously is only
black and grey, no other colours involved. Now that you know what is it let me
start explaining on how to do it.
In this case, let us talk about portrait tattoo, first things
first is to apply the stencil that you made, make sure that you do not put
lines on the shadow of the image, you can put dotted lines or dashed lines in
order for you to know that is a shadow and not a line, the tattoo will look
like a cartoon image or a comic character not a realistic portrait if you put
lines all over it. Just want you to know that most of the portraits tattoo that
was made has no solid line works, for example in the lips nose chin. So you can
start shading using a 15 curve magnum so it has smooth edges and follow your
stencil to make a base design.
I usually start shading from bottom all the way
to the top so that the stencil won’t be rubbed off or fade away by my hand or while you’re applying green soap
to clean the dirty regions.
With shading shadows, you can use a shading solution to
break down the colour of your black ink, from dark grey to light grey and
instead of using white ink you can just leave the skin behind. When applying
the shading ink you make sure that you make it very light, this to avoid the
skin from bleeding and making it kind of reddish looking colour. If the skin
bleeds it will just push out the ink and if the skin gets really reddish there
are a lot of chances that you might scar the client’s skin or you won’t be able
to see the actual shadow that you have applied.
In short, make it really smooth
not too light and not too deep. It’s better to have light shading at first
rather than having dark shadows already, because if you have made a little bit
of mistake in applying the shadow you can always do a repair unlike when you
already applied dark color you won’t be able to use an eraser to fix it.
Well, I guess that’s it for now, I have to go and I’m really
very very busy. I’ll continue again when I have a chance, hope this helps.
