Why would anyone line with a mag?
Hey I'm Jake from the Fireside tattoo Network and I think that's what we called this video, something like that
"Why would you line with a magnum?"
something along those lines. And if you followed our show, if you follow the podcast for any period of time,
you probably know that we tend to focus more on drawing related problems as they relate to
tattooing, rather than on solving technical problems. That is something at this point
that's still really best done in a traditional apprenticeship, in a one-on-one atmosphere and
nearly impossible to do online or through YouTube. So that's why we focus mainly on drawing. So given
that bit of knowledge the title to this episode may seem a little strange because it seems like
we're trying to give technical advice, but it's really no different. What I intend to focus on
in this episode is helping you to recognize the unique types of marks that tattoo machines and
different needle configurations are able to make and how to use those marks in your own way to
kind of create your own unique voice in tattoo, create your own unique work. You know a lot
of us if you've been tattooing for any period of time or even if you're just starting out,
the typical process is lining, shading, coloring, wrap it up, you're done. And
this is a little more advanced than that, it kind of turns that on its head a little bit. So quick
disclaimer, if you are still fairly early on in your tattoo career or if you are an apprentice
and your mentor says I don't care what fireside says you're not lining with a mag, please listen
to your mentor and ignore me. They have a better feel on what your skill set is right now, where
you stand and how to best guide you. I'm kind of putting this out for the more advanced viewers,
people that are maybe a little bit stagnant feel like if they're doing the same types of things
over and over and I'm hoping this kind of gives you a shot in the arm and and maybe allows you
to have a fresh approach on how to how to go about some of your large-scale designs,
some of the more unique pieces that you're taking on. So that's it I hope you guys enjoy
the video. Please feel free to leave a comment below, we'll do our best to get back with you,
to respond to your comments and if you liked it click like, if you don't click don't, thanks.
All right let's dive in here this is about a 30 plus hour back piece and I'm trying to cram
into about 15 minutes so we're gonna be cutting through this at a pretty decent clip and I'm just
gonna focus on the the main elements of designing a tattoo this way. So I tend to start a lot of my
large-scale work just with a very loose marker drawing. I find that it's more efficient and a
lot faster than trying to make a lot of stencils to line up and stick on the skin and with large
organic pieces like this one that kind of can flow in different directions, this just is the
just a more natural way for me to approach it. And you see here as I block in with this light
colored marker that I'm thinking in terms of masses right now and not in terms of lines,
so as as opposed to like making a stencil that was a line drawing and I would have the edges
of all of these branches really clearly defined. The way that I'm scrubbing it in
with this marker is more like I'm thinking about dark and light masses rather than
the outline of any of these shapes. I should also say that this idea of lining with a mag,
I didn't come up with a lot of tattooers have done this for years and I talked to a Guy Aitchison
about it when we interviewed him a year or so ago and he said he first heard of a group of
tattooers in I want to say Indiana in the 80's lining with mags, because they were having a hard
time making liners work properly getting solid lines in the skin and they found it was easier
to get the marks they were looking for with the mag. Which makes which proves my point here is
that there's tons of different types of marks that tattoo machines can make and different
needle configurations can make to get different effects and it's important to find what works
for you and not just rely on what everyone has told you is the proper way to to go about it.
So as we cut forward here I've roughed in the entire tattoo at this point with just a 5 mag in
black ink, so it looks like we have a wide variety of grays and blacks but really it's just the the
amount of pressure I'm putting down with my hand and the speed in my hand and and how many times
I'm going over it that's giving that illusion of a being or that's making it darker or lighter.
And even though some of these lines look halfway solid, they're really kind of soft at the edges.
If you get up to it, which I think we will hear in just a minute, you'll see that it looks kind
of like a rough charcoal drawing. Like you got a piece of compressed or vine charcoal and just
went through and roughed out a basic shape. It's kind of loose at the edges and that's what I want.
With this tattoo I wanted to give the effect that it was kind of moving back in the distance that
it was kind of painterly kind of atmospheric and outlining all of my branches with you know like a
just a traditional liner, it wouldn't have given me that effect quite as quite as easily because
all of the edges would have been sharp enough that they would have kind of wanted to jump forward
and I want some of these edges to fall way back into the distance and almost go away like we're
like we're looking through the atmosphere into the distance. Another cool thing, as you can see right
here, is that I'm able to kind of invent shapes or adjust shapes on the fly. So like for example,
that branch that I'm working on wasn't even there a second ago and as I start to build these shapes,
this gives me the freedom to say like "well I'd like this branch to be a little bit fuller" and
"this branch to be a little more sparse." I'm always trying to think of contrasting shapes,
so heavy shapes as opposed to light shapes you know, dark shapes as opposed to light shapes
things like that and taking this approach with a real organic tattoo like this in this type of
needle configuration, which you can move through the skin really quickly and efficiently without
really beating it up too bad is great for this type of this type of approach. I'm focusing on
a single light source here, I'm just thinking of my light coming from above. I'm thinking about a
cylinder. I'm not thinking about a tree branch, I am building some texture and as I go. But if
that starts to get confusing to me, I just go back to thinking well this is just a cylinder
with light coming from the top and I'm just thinking of dark and light shapes at this point,
all of my edges are nice and soft because I haven't used a liner at all just yet.
I mentioned that we're going through this tattoo kind of quickly. If you want to see a longer version of this video
we've got a 40-plus minute version in our foundations course, and it tackles
my entire thought process from start to finish on this piece. It follows our
fireside principles of shape, value, edge and color and it is included in your foundation's
membership. If you want to learn any more about foundations, I'll make sure that there's a link in
the video description here you can go to a video that that tells you what foundations is about.
It's basically a drawing focused course that tackles the specific issues that tattooers face.
So right now, I'm going through and I'm trying to separate my foreground branches from my mid-ground
branches from my background branches. So a lot of times when you see tree tattoos, say like a tree
of life or something like that, they'll tend to look really flat like every branch is sitting on
the same plane and I don't want that to happen. I want to give the illusion that the tattoo is
moving back further into space. So what I've done basically here is I'm just taking, I'm still using
straight black, any variations or gradations that I'm getting is only through how I move my hand and
not through moving to gray or watered-down ink at all. But I'm starting with my mid-ground branches.
My foreground branches being right there, you can see them in the front the two kind of big ones
that are very light, there's gonna be a lot of light hitting those. My mid-ground branches are my
darkest branches and then my background branches are a little bit lighter. So here is that first
sitting completely healed and settled in, and you see all of these edges are really light it just
looks like a charcoal drawing, right. You see that some of those branches go back into the distance
and that was done just with straight black ink and a five mag and I just kind of whipped through and
changed the change the pressure and the speed of my hand to get those effects and I've got a really
nice base now to build color on top of. It's not you know it's not perfect, it's not smooth blends
all the way across but it's in there solid enough for me to work from. I've got a great foundation
of darks and lights and I know where I'm going moving forward. There's kind of a rough idea
looking into the Cintiq here of what I think it's gonna look like, and it is pretty rough. I don't
typically over plan big tattoos like this, I like to let them evolve kind of naturally.
So here is after the first pass of color, still no lines. I still haven't lined anything. All of
these shapes have been made with a mag. I've moved to a larger mag configuration at this point to do
a lot of the color, but it's all very muted tones, browns, gray undertones laid straight over the
top of that black so a lot of my value decisions were already made. The hierarchy of the design,
as far as where my lights are gonna catch, that decision was made before I ever got to color.
You can see as we cut through it here and it settled in that what's drawing your attention,
before we get any of our bright color in, what's drawing your attention is these two main branches
that come forward and you've got his skin tone that's catching a lot of light. And all that was
all done before I ever got to color. All that all those decisions were made and all those problems
were solved on that first pass of just black. So now we're getting into color and I'm gonna start
to get a lot more vibrant, a lot more saturated at this point. You know, we're always thinking
about contrast; we're contrasting dark shapes to light shapes, large shapes to small shapes,
muted color to intense high-chroma color you know and edges, we're using very soft and almost lost
edges all the way up to very very sharp edges. Up to now, I still haven't used a liner at all
I'm doing all of this with with mags. Starting to lay in some of my lighter background tones
here as I started to work those reds up his left side, I was starting to realize that that this
tattoo could get really heavy really quickly if I wasn't careful. So I broke away from that area
and found an area of kind of intense light in the background where I can have some lighter,
kind of relief areas for the eye, pushing through the branches more to the center of the tree just
to just to keep it from getting so heavy and dense. And you can see a lot of these reds I
just laid straight over the top of my color and of black and gray on the branches, I'm just laying
kinda brick reds right over the top of them and it's almost like glazing a painting and I'm just
kind of tinting the tattoo whatever direction I want it to go. If I need a if the red is in
the shadows I might cool the red off to more of a magenta. As the red comes into the light
I might warm it up and go more towards oranges and yellows and and and you know warmer tones.
Now this type of approach of using this these kind of painterly marks, these really loose marks,
these soft edges, tends to work better in in larger multiple sitting tattoos for me. You
might find that you can use it in a single session one shot tattoo, but for me I like to see all of
those soft that just kind of settle in, see some of those muted colors kind of settle in and decide
where I want to come back and push them out in future sittings. If I had to do it all in one
sitting, I probably would approach it a little more traditionally. I probably would go ahead and
get you know my lines in there, make sure that I got my colors all saturated on the first pass
but but the reason that I love tattoos like these these, big kind of organic shapes that I get to
look at you know three four or five times before I before I call it finished. I love the freedom that
these types of tattoos give me to make decisions to see what's working and what's not working. I
love a painter who has a great YouTube channel his name was Andrew Tischler and he, anytime he looks
at a painting when he starts the day when he's been away from it for a while, he asked himself:
what's working, what's not working and what if. And I've started to ask myself that too,
you know what's working about this? Well I love how those shapes and the immediate foreground are
catching all the light. Well what's not working? Some of these branches in the background are
getting a little more dense that I want. Well what if I introduced little pops of light in-between them?
That kind of thing. And if you're always asking yourself those questions, then you're
always becoming a better problem-solver. So I'm going through in the sitting and just kind of
re-saturating those reds, making sure that they're that I've got smooth blends. You can see
as I moved down into the roots that I went to this kind of sap, weird off greeny yellow color. So I
wanted to use a compliment here but I didn't want it to be too intense. So I went from red to green,
which is a compliment, but I went from a really intense red and I contrasted it with a very
muted kind of de-saturated green so that I'm using both color contrast, value contrast and
chroma contrast; intensity of a color as a to a muted version of another color. And really
if you look at it right now, you might say well there's no need to put any lines in this tattoo,
it reads just fine. But as we come in and we put lines in at the end I think you'll see what a huge
difference they make and you'll see the point of approaching it in this way, where you're really
thinking about where you want to draw attention towards the end of a tattoo and using your edges
to push attention that way. You can kind of see these abstracted skulls that are in the in the
trunk of the tree, the the client wanted me to hide some skulls in a tattoo and I'm not really
crazy about that kind of thing. I like to make my tattoos a little more obvious. So I didn't so much
hide it, but what I did do was made it a secondary element, you know, there's a skull kind of laying
in there but it's not as important as the larger branches in front of it that are catching all of
the light. I kind of dropped it into the shadows a little bit, so that so that it wasn't a tattoo
about a skull. It was a tattoo about a tree and then the skull is kind of a secondary element
and I did that by limiting the value range in the skull, it doesn't approach the lightest lights.
All right so here it is, we're probably thirty hours into this tattoo and I am just now using
a liner for the first time. And if you look at that mark that I just made right here on this
on this little chunk of tree trunk, it kind of jumps forward and all of those branches that are
off to the side of it and that go back in the distance, soften and mute even further now that
we have the contrast of that really bold crisp line in the foreground. And so that's really
why I like this type of approach, it allows me a lot of freedom. I can come back at the end
of a tattoo and say "okay, where are my three to five sharpest edges in this whole tattoo,
let me go ahead and make those things super sharp, super bold and so they come forward and then and
then the contrasting edges that are softer kind of fall back into the distance." And you know when I
started this tattoo, I probably didn't know that that part of the tree was something I wanted to
focus attention on, that's something that was kind of revealed to me throughout this process
throughout the tattoo. I've slowly realized "okay, I really like how this branch is coming
forward so I'll probably want to push." Now I'm coming back into the nasal cavity in that skull
and just sharpening that edge slightly. This is also a great time to come back and lay in your
darkest darks you know we laid all those blacks in on the front end and then we came through and we
and we blasted color over the top of all of them and that will knock blacks back you know 10-20%
as they settle in. So these last sittings when I come back and I'm sharpening all these edges I'll
also go through and find all my blackest black, which is normally like cast shadows, shadows that
are falling from one shape on to another or the dark side of a form and I'll just kind of block in
those those darkest darks and kind of re-saturate them. You can see right now I'm doing that on this
branch off in the distance here. Just, it's the underside of a branch, I'm darkening it because
I want the head of that skull to come out just a little bit further and I'm always just kind of
looking at this point and saying "okay, well if the light is coming from here, would that branch
have a darker shadow on the underside of it or would it cast a shadow onto the branch that is
just past it?" And taking this general to specific approach in this type of tattoo allows me to do
that. Now if this were a you know a full back mandala, then obviously everything that I'm
talking about here goes out the window. This works really well on organic kind of painterly
tattoos like this. Now that's not to say that you won't find another use for it, it works well for
me in this setting. You may find a use for using a five mag in a mandala, I don't know. But what I'm
encouraging to do through this video is to just explore, experiment. Make sure that you're seeing
your tattoos come back healed. Get people to swing back by and you know offer them 10% off of another
tattoo if they'll make sure to come back in and let you look at this one healed, just so that you
see what's working and what's not working. A lot of times we end up, when we're not seeing tattoos
all the time, we end up kind of guessing and assuming that something worked out and we really
don't know whether it does or whether it did or whether it didn't and here we are doing it over
and over again. And so you end up kind of forming bad habits a lot of times and not knowing what's
working and what's not just because you don't get to see your healed work as often as you should.
So putting fire out here so that so the client can get an idea of what it actually looks like and see
you can see those edges as we zoom in here, those ones that were made with the five mag, they're
soft. They're kind of atmospheric, even the ones in the foreground. And that's what I wanted, you
know. I wanted this thing to to kind of give the illusion that it was moving back in the distance
and for the most part I think it worked well. There are a few things that I would do differently
but that's why we do this, you know. We do a tattoo to the best of our ability and then we let
it settle in and we look at it we say "okay, that worked great, that didn't work so well, I'll come
back to this next time." I feel like there are a few decisions I could have made in the roots that
would have made them a little more dynamic. But here we go this was the heeled first sitting right here.
All blacks settled in, a lot of variety of edges, full value range. Here it was with the
first pass of color, just very muted colors right over the tops of those blacks and you can see how
they knock those blacks back so much, settle them down a lot. And then finally the finished tattoo.
So that's it, I hope you got something out of this. Like I said, experiment; see what works, see
what doesn't work and let us know what you think. Thank you guys as always for supporting what we do