Hey there, welcome to the Fireside Tattoo Network.
My name is Jake, and this is our newest series called Three Minutes
to Better Tattooing, where we try in three minutes or less
to give you some little nuggets, some little tidbit that you can plug into
your tattoo process to help you become better, faster, more efficient, whatever.
So before I wasted much of our time, let's go ahead and get into it.
So today's tip has to do with dot work or stippled style tattoos,
which is a cool style.
It's an interesting kind of effect whenever it's done well.
And I had never done it much throughout my career.
In fact, I had always thought that anyone who was doing dot work
where they were making individual dots with the machine on the skin.
What you can't do
and a lot of people have been doing that, it's just not all that efficient.
It's kind of slow going.
But I was tattooing with my friend Robin Pallotta, and she showed me
a way that she has been stippling for the last few years
using this little guy, this Dan Kubin sidewinder,
to do kind of a whipped stipple.
So almost like you are doing.
What's the term I'm looking for?
Like a light kind of gray wash.
Like you're kind of lightly using it to working off the tip of the needle
and brushing the skin.
And it gives this really nice, consistent, stippled effect.
She runs the machine at about two point six, two point
seven volts, which really isn't enough to get the machine started.
You kind of have to thump it
with your hand, kind of kick start it to get the machine actually up and going.
I've been doing this using this technique running at around three volts.
So you kind of have to use your own judgment, your own kind of
based on your own hand speed.
But somewhere in the two point six, two, three point two range is probably
is probably about right.
And you move your hand at your own kind of speed,
you really don't have to slow down much at all.
I thought for sure that that the needles would hang up in the skin, get caught.
But I haven't had that problem.
And in fact, this technique is is incredibly forgiving.
First off, it gives you
the ability to build up texture and build up your values slowly.
And it does so with with really minimal skin trauma.
But there's almost no redness, no bleeding at all with with this technique
whenever it's done
right now, like I said earlier, I'm not really burying the tube to the skin.
I'm kind of working off of the tip of the needle and slowly building
building the textures up or building the dotwork up.
I would suggest while you're trying to figure out kind of what hand speed
and what voltage work for you that you uh,
that you start in an area of the tattoo that will be the darkest area eventually.
So maybe have an area that's going to be solid black
and start to slowly like scumble or sweep, find the motion that works for you
to get the best and most consistent sort of stipple work out of it.
And you'll find that it happens really quickly.
It's not it doesn't take long to figure it out.
I will say that I haven't found many rotaries
outside of the Kubin here that this works
with all of my pin style machines don't seem to pull this off very well.
But I would think any coil machine, anything that's fairly punchy
at low voltages would would probably work just fine.
Well, like I said, I've been using this Dan Kubin Sidewinder for this effect
and it works great.
But you can see in the final results here that you can really create a lot of depth
and a lot of cool effects by using the stippled, the stipple kind of technique.
And I've been doing it a lot along with traditional gray wash.
So I'll lay a gray wash down
in the stipple right over the top of it to to create more texture. So that's it.
I want to thank my friend Robin Pallotta for sharing this tip with me.
It's proving to be super, super valuable.
I use it all the time. And you don't have to use it exclusively.
You can try to work it in with some of your color work,
maybe some more of your more of your sort .
You're more refined, black and gray stuff, just using the different areas and see
if you can slowly, slowly work it in if you do decide to to experiment with it.
We'd love it if you would tag fireside tattoo in your social media posts.
And so we can check it out and see how you're using the technique.
I have even in an effort to show my clients what it might look like.
I changed one of my pens in Procreate.
I changed the spacing
so that it gave that same effect so I can kind of quickly stipple shade
my drawings in procreate and show my clients what they might look like.
So thank you guys, as always,
for supporting Fireside Tattoo Network, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Hey, thanks again for watching.
Please be sure to like and comment and subscribe to our channel
so you can stay up to date with all of the things that we are doing.
If you would like to buy us a drink, please support us on Patreon.
There's a button somewhere around here that allows you to do that.
You can also visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter
so you know where we're headed and what we're doing.
And while you're there, please check out our merchandise page.
Buy yourself fancy new fireside tee shirt.
Thank you for supporting the Fireside
Tattoo Network, and we'll see you on the next episode.