Sleeve design.
Let's talk about the most vital piece of that puzzle.
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Fireside, my name is Jake.
So happy to have you here today.
I have a symphony of leaf blowers going in my neighbor's yard,
so that's going to be fun to deal with when it comes to audio
editing time, but hopefully it's not too bad.
We'll see.
So I wanted to put together a quick episode today on on sleeve design
and specifically on mapping the body, mapping the arm properly.
And this will translate to legs and other areas too.
But arms tend to be the most difficult and the most common
when people start to step up
to larger scale tattooing, sleeves are normally
one of the earlier things that they approach,
and one of the most crucial parts of sleeve design or the most crucial
because every step afterwards depends on this,
is getting an accurate map of the arm, of the body.
And so I thought I would go through my process for,
for creating accurate body maps to design sleeves.
Now, the reason
that this is such an important topic as you move into large scale design is
you'll notice a lot of times with with sleeves,
if you look at people out in public that they'll have, you know, a really well
thought out area on the outer arm, maybe the forearm, maybe
even the inner bicep in the inner forearm, those pieces look like they belong.
And then you get around to the back of the arm somewhere around here,
and it looks like the artists just kind of lost their train of thought.
And it looks like just a bunch of filler on the back of the tricep.
And you're like, Well, there's nothing even there to look at.
And that's what happens most of the time whenever beginners try to plan
sleeves are really just a lot of artists never get past this point
when they plan sleeves and they don't accurately map the body
so that all the major pieces of the puzzle actually relate to each other.
The most important thing you want to think about is
there should be something
interesting to look at at whatever angle the viewer experiences the sleeve.
So if you're standing behind someone in the store
and looking down the back of their arm, at their elbow,
at this back area of the arm, at their tricep,
there should be a focal point there and it should relate.
That upper focal point should relate to the bottom
and they should look like they belong together in the same world.
And in order to make that happen,
you really need to get good at mapping the body accurately.
So before digital drawing, whenever we were doing everything analog,
we would typically use a big role of tracing paper like this
and we would roll it out over the person's arm and we would make marks
with a sharpie of all of the important landmarks on the body.
So the top of the shoulder, the front and the back of the armpit,
inside the bend of the arm, the elbow, typically this bone and this bone.
And those would be for me, those were my kind of mapping areas.
So then we would take that map and we would literally do a full scale drawing
of the tattoo
on the tracing paper and then use that to make our stencils.
And that was really a great way to, to, to plan sleeves and to lay them out
because you're drawing to scale, you know, exactly where every piece is
going to fit and everything should tie together if you made an accurate map.
So fast forward here to modern times when we're all drawing digitally.
I have a big Cintiq tablet that I draw on right here.
I also have my iPad and procreate that I draw on like everyone else quite a bit.
So nowadays what we tend to do is will photograph our client at different angles
and we'll stitch those together
like so inside of an app like Photoshop or Procreate.
And then we'll draw to the panels.
And that's great for visualizing and it's great for the client
to see what the piece might look like on their arm.
But the trouble with it is you don't really know how this panel
is going to transition to this panel
or how this panel is going to relate to this panel.
Because when they're
laid out as separate photographs, it's hard to see where they actually meet.
So what I do now is I kind of use a hybrid model of those two.
I like doing the full scale body tracing
the mapmaking on tracing paper, but I like to draw digitally.
So what I'll do is I still go through and I make all of my landmarks and I
physically mark them on the client's body and then translate
those to the to the tracing paper so that I have a very accurate map.
Then I stand up over the tracing paper,
I'll lay it out on a white ground, so you might lay it out on a bed sheet.
I happen to have a white floor in my an area of my studio
that I'm able to lay it down on.
And I stand on a chair and I get over the top of it with my phone
and I get centered and I take a photo of my tracing.
Then I'll come through and I'll import that photo as one of my layers.
So you can see this is
my map, my tracing of this client.
Then I'll go through and I'll make my drawing just kind of
a black and white simple drawing as I want it to be laid out on each panel.
And I kind of guesstimate
you can see that
the turtle is going to sit
kind of at the end of the arm and it's also going to fall to the inner arm.
So I'll draw it on one and then kind of copy and paste it to the other panel
and just so that I can see can visualize how that's going
to actually work just in the round.
But like I mentioned earlier, I don't have a good feel from this layout
how these waves are going to fall into these shapes right here are even
how this wing of the crane is going to intercept the the tortoise here.
So this these transitions are where the where the trouble really starts to happen.
So if I did go through and just made line drawings of these four panels
and tried to stencil those and stick them on the skin, they wouldn't line up.
They wouldn't sit the way that I want them to.
And I'd end up with a lot of odd shapes overlapping each other
that I would have to deal with. Then on the skin.
And that's where we tend to run into trouble.
Hey, today's video is brought to you by us, the Fireside Tattoo Network.
Have you heard of Fireside Simplify?
It is a course that we designed here for intermediate to advanced tattooers.
Tattooers who are stepping up from small to medium sized
tattoos up to larger scale tattooing.
And it's a way to reduce the
number of options that you allow yourself at each point in the process
so that you design better tattoos faster and with less effort.
We've all heard of analysis paralysis.
When you have so many options that you just don't know what to do,
you're staring at a blank page or you're staring at a at an outer arm
and you're trying to figure out where to start.
And you're searching Google and Pinterest for reference images.
Simplify was designed to help you to make these types of decisions
faster and easier by using if then scenarios.
I would be thrilled
if you would click into the card above or the the link in the description below,
which will lead you to a video
that will explain more about the benefits of Fireside Simplify.
Now back to the episode.
So what I'll do is I will go through and I'll trace each of these
individual panels and I'll literally stitch them together
and drop them on top of the physical map that I made.
So you can see that
I took all of those individual elements, those individual panels.
I tried to make one cohesive tracing out of them,
and then I literally just using the the selection tool,
I just selected them and drag them and stack them up where they fit the way
that I wanted them to on this physical map that I made of the client's body.
And you can see this little plus is the bend of my arm or the bend of his arm.
This little square is the elbow.
These two V's are the front and back area of the armpit.
This little dot on the top is this bone right here, the end of the kind of
clavicle this is the armpit, the center of the armpit right here.
So I knew that these were going to sit right there.
And then if you go down here, I have the two bones of the wrist here and here.
And so what I'll do and this is the the real trick that I think makes it easy,
makes it makes the difference for me
is when I make the stencil, I'll actually stencil
all of these little indicators, all of these little guys.
Then I'll go through and the client gets
there, my stencil is made, I'll take a light colored sharpie
and I'll remake the same marks where I want them to line up on his body.
And then when I'm going to lay to lay the stencil on the client, I'm actually
just lining up the plus with the plus in the square, with the square.
I’m lining up those those those little kind of markers
that I indicated on the body, rather than worrying about where the bird sits
and where the turtle sits.
Because I know if I line those markers up correctly that the tattoo is going to sit
where I want it to.
And that really allows me to cut my drawing time
and my prep time down the day of the appointment by quite a bit.
So I can get this stencil placed on his skin
really quickly and really efficiently so that I'm tattooing
and I can actually get some progress made on the tattoo.
And so here's the end of that.
First sitting, I was able to wash in all of my lines and lay in some background
and all of that done at about five or 6 hours.
So it really helps you become an efficient tattooer if you learn to map the body
accurately and learn how to stencil accurately.
One final real advantage to this method is that I'm able to make the stencil
in advance because I have on my on my tracing,
I have the actual measurements of his body so I can make the stencil to scale
before the client ever shows up rather than having to wait on them to get there
and test copies and test different sizes of stencils
and get it to the right size and then stitch it all together.
Because I have this accurate kind of body map already made.
I know exactly how big the tattoo needs to be, how big the stencil needs to be,
and so I can make the stencil before the client ever shows up.
So I hope that was helpful.
I certainly don't mean to say this is the only way or the best way
to stencil large scale designs.
But it is my way and it's worked for me for years.
I love to hear what you guys are doing.
I'm really curious what you're using if you are physically tracing the body,
are you using tracing paper?
I know a lot of people are using like contact paper.
That's kind of tacky.
Some people use like a saran wrap or a cling wrap
that has its own kind of advantages and disadvantages.
The main disadvantage in my mind with the Cling Wrap
is that it tends to glare in the photo and I have a hard time
getting rid of that glare, but they do make some matte finish
kind of cling wraps that I know some people are using.
So I'd love to hear what you guys are using to map bodies.
If you have any other tricks
that you think might be helpful, feel free to leave them in the comments.
And thank you as always for supporting what we do.