Hey, welcome to the the Fireside.
My name is Jake.
So excited to have you back here with me today for this
3 minutes to better tattooing episode.
Today we're going to focus on stenciling tattoos for dark skin.
Earlier in my career, I struggled mightily with stenciling
dark skin and tattooing dark skin, to be honest.
And the problem that I had was multifaceted,
and it took me quite a few years to figure out how to solve
all of the little problems, individual problems that were adding up to create
one kind of gigantic problem for me when it came time to start tattooing.
So hopefully I can provide a couple of tips
for you today to help you become a better problem solver and have an easier time
stenciling darker skin tones.
All right.
So let's cut over to my IPad real quickly and we'll run through an example
of how I approach stenciling for darker skin.
So this is a recent project of mine on my client Zeke and I have the opacity
set down on a couple of these layers, but Zeke is fairly dark complected.
You can tell here as I zoom in and and I went ahead and I just did a drawing
the way that I normally would.
We're doing a grim reaper on his outer arm.
So let me go ahead and pull Zeke's photo out of the way,
and I'll show you kind of where this stenciling process starts.
So this is my sketch, my drawing.
And one thing that I'll do at this phase is I'll come through and separate my light
and shadow shapes as definitively as I can, where light is hitting on a shape
against where shadow, where light dissipates and where light is not hitting
against a shape.
So what I'll do at the end of a sketch like this
is I'll come through on maybe a separate layer
and I
will grab the background color, I'll grab white,
and I'll just come through and paint a brush I have here, I'll just come through
and I will paint anything that is in the light side of the object.
I'll just paint back white.
You can also go through and erase
But this way, if you make a mistake, it's on a separate layer and you're
just kind of painting everything on top of the layer below.
And if you mess up, you can erase your white and bring the old drawing back.
So I go through and I literally just
focus on the simplest possible shapes I think about, okay,
this entire forehead, I want all of this to be in the light.
So any of these areas I come through and I just make an abrupt shift.
No real subtle transition, just an abrupt shift from white
to shadow and everything in my light
family, everything on the light side of the object is just going to be blank.
There's going to be no stencil there.
So I'm just going to come through and do this all the way through.
Once I get this to a point, this doesn't have to be perfect for me.
At least.
I just want it to be clear enough that whenever I'm looking at it
as a reference, I can while I'm working on the tattoo
and I'm looking at his reference that I can easily see
what is in the light and what is in the shadow.
I don't want there to be any kind of ambiguous areas where I'm not sure.
Is the light hitting that or is it not?
I'm not too worried about texture or anything like that at this point.
I just want to very clearly indicate light shapes and shadow shapes
as simply as possible for the sake of the stencil.
So here, let me pull my underdrawing out
and I'll show you the way that I make these line drawings for the stencils.
I'm doing a couple of things here.
One thing is that I'm leaving all of the white shapes completely skin tone,
and I'm just outlining the transition from the shadow to the light.
The second thing that I'm doing is I'm coming through and I'm using line
to represent the flow of that area of the form in shadow only on the shadow sides.
So I go through and you can see like the bottom of this jaw
has this type of a shape, the underside of the jaw,
has this type of a shape where I'm looking at the cloak,
I can see kind of where my folds are happening,
where the lines are getting tighter together
and then where they're opening up.
So this tells me that this shape is going back in.
This shape is coming forward.
And I do this all the way through just on the shadow sides of the shape.
And then I come through finally with my major separations and I boldly line those.
So this is what a final line drawing for a stencil
might look like for me as I prepare to stencil darker skin tones.
Now, the next thing that I do is more materials base.
I prefer the red stencil paper to the purple stencil paper for darker
skin tones.
I always have a problem with purple stencils on dark skin, turning
metallic and gold, looking kind of reflective whenever it dried.
So I would put the stencil on the darker skin tone, peel it off
and it would tend to look like gold flake or something.
And it was really hard to see.
I would have to wet it again with a paper towel bit
for it
to turn back purple so that I could see where
the line actually was or make some sense out of it.
And I never had good luck with purple stencils on darker skin tones.
The red stencil, as you can see here, goes on.
It is light is a lighter stencil
than the than the purple, but it doesn't turn metallic.
And for me, it's easier to read across the board,
especially with the darker the skin tone gets.
And you can see here on the stencil itself, even though it's very light
that I can see all those directional lines in the shadow shapes
and it's helping me to determine what shapes are doing what.
So I can really clearly separate light shapes
and shadow shapes and then the flow of different shadow shapes.
And as a
final tip, just kind of a bonus tip, since it's not really related to stencils,
is I go through
and I block in all of the light and shadow shapes with just a single value.
So this is just a dark gray that I go through.
I don't get too hung up in outlines on the front end of these.
I like to come through, get a quick pass of an outline in
and then very quickly and loosely block in all of my shadow shapes.
Then I'll leave all of my light shapes, completely skin tone.
You can see here, this is the end of my very first sitting on this tattoo.
This tattoo will be color, which presents a whole new kind of set of challenges.
But within this first pass, it's already very legible.
It's easy to read from a distance,
and I want to make sure that I can keep that going forward.
I don't want to start to lose that whenever I start carving in details
and when I start laying color on top of it.
In the easiest way to ensure that you're able to keep those clear legible shapes
starts with this line drawing and creating a clear, legible stencil.
And it doesn't have to be the way that I do it.
It needs to be something that you look at instantly understand.
So just to quickly run through these tips one more time in order,
the first thing you want to do is make sure that you clearly separate
your light and shadow shapes in your initial drawing, in your sketch
so that you can easily translate those to a line drawing.
Once you have your line drawing down, make sure to keep your light shapes
completely open.
And I like to use some type of a line,
a directional line that that establishes
the flow in the transition within the shadow shapes.
I tend to get confused inside of shadow shapes if they're just one big blob.
So I want to recognize the separation in those shadow shapes.
From there, I always use the red stencil paper instead of purple.
Not crazy about the way that the purple looks on darker skin.
It's hard for me to read.
And then as a bonus tip I try to go through.
I don't worry too much about getting perfect outlines in the first pass.
I just want to clearly block in the masses of the shadow shapes
so that my light shapes are very clear and easy to read.
So I hope that was helpful.
If you have some other tips that you would recommend to folks,
love you to share them with us.
This is not “the way to stencil dark skin”.
It's just a way that I've found that works for me,
and I hope some of those tips will work for you as well.
Thank you, as always, for supporting what we do.
I’ll catch you next time.