Hey,.
Welcome to the Fireside.
My name is Jake.
So excited to have you here with me.
I've got an episode today that we actually haven't done one like this
in, in some time where it's kind of an over the shoulder tattooing episode,
and I'm talking about problem solving.
And this one in particular I thought was worth sharing with you guys because.
So often whenever we're, we're reworking old tattoos or tattoos that were not
done well, we think about the technical ability of the previous artist.
If we're trying to cover something up or we're trying to, to finish
a, a bad tattoo, we think about the scarring of the skin or sketchy lines
or spotty color, things like that.
And in my experience, that's usually not.
Issue with, with poorly done tattoos, usually I can, I can handle
whatever kind of skin trauma that the previous artist left behind.
But I will in this episode get into what the major issue for me typically is.
So, without wasting any more time, let's jump into the episode.
So, like I mentioned in the introduction, typically the technical ability of the
previous tattooer that you're following up or cleaning up behind isn't the biggest
problem to solve in, in my experience.
Let's cut over here and I'll show you a good example.
I had a client, just for a little backstory.
I had a client.
Who went to get a tattoo at another local shop and realized pretty quickly
that the tattoo was not going as she had hoped and so wisely she got out of
there before the situation got any worse.
But she did leave there with the line work and this is how
the tattoo first came to me.
So I'm gonna zoom in here to show you that.
Technically the tattoo is pretty terrible.
The lines are very sketchy.
They were in there, They were not only sketchy, but they were heavy and solid.
And raised and all of the things that you might expect from a, a tattooer
who's just learning what they're doing and is, is not very competent
and not very good with the tools.
But the bigger problem to me is not the line work itself.
It's not the scarring, it's not the heavy blown out.
Stuff.
What this tattooer failed to recognize is how important the shape of the body is.
That's the one thing that we don't have any control over.
So shapes are the biggest issue that I run into whenever I'm dealing with
existing tattoos that I'm trying to either finish or cover or rework.
And so when you have a hip, something like this, you tend to want to make big,
sweeping kind of S-curves or large Cs.
Or do something that kind of mimics the shape of the body that
compliments the shape of the body.
And you'll notice here what this tattooer did is they broke the
shape of the body repeatedly.
So you've got this line of the snake that the body in the head of the
snake that draw a hard horizontal.
And if you take these two roses that are here and here, they're
nearly at a hard horizontal, hard horizontal, almost everything.
We've got a little bit of a sweep up here, but it doesn't really follow any
natural curve of of the client's body.
Here you can see even this bend is very awkward and clunky.
So let's cut over and take a quick look at my solution to these problems, the
problems of shape and the problems of these hard blown out kind of edges.
And you'll see that there are some things we have to sacrifice on
and some things that we're able to get under control pretty easily.
Hey, I do wanna take a minute in this episode to thank
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Me, us, the Fireside Tattoo Network.
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so the first thing that I did here is I quickly crudely, kind of drew in
these big sweeping leaf shapes that lifted the viewer's eye up so that
we're starting to use the shape of her body rather than constantly breaking
that shape with these hard horizontals.
And once I kind of laid out about where I thought these leaves might sweep up and
through from behind the snake to in front of the snake, I started to go to work on.
Hard blown out outlines.
What I did is I just came in with some kind of straight blacks and I started
to shade right off of the outlines in an effort to turn the lines into just edges.
So I don't want them to read as lines at all.
I want them to read as a transition between shapes, and for the most
part, I want them to read as as soft a transition as possible.
So now I'll roll in and I start to line, try to boldly line these
leaf shapes that I had drawn in.
And these are my effort to kind of change and battle those horizontals that the
that the previous tattooer laid in there.
And you can see that I'm having to draw these right over the top
of those outlines of the snake.
And this is where I think it's important to.
To stress that you can't let perfection get in the way of progress, so, so
I was really clear on the front end of this tattoo when I met with a
client that I couldn't possibly make the tattoo as good as it would be
if I had done it from scratch, but I could get it to a point where it'd
be much, much better than it was.
when she came in the door, or than it would've been if she had let
the previous artist finish it up.
So in this first session, I had two main goals that I wanted to knock out.
The first was to break up all those harsh horizontal shapes and introduce those
leaf shapes to sweep up the client's hip, lift the viewer's eyes so that it
went through the composition and followed the shape of her body, and didn't get
stuck at every one of those roadblocks that the previous tattooer had had.
introduced And the second was just to introduce a light source and
break up the light and shadow shapes.
And by doing that, I was able to turn those hard, bold, blown out outlines
into softer edges transitions.
I did that by shading, really separating my light and shadow shapes so that my
shadows could be pretty dark and my lights could be just skin tone at this point.
And then in the second sitting, we'll deal with color and see if we can
continue to push that back a little.
. So what you're seeing here is a video of the healed first session.
When we're starting the second session, you can see here that the existing lines
of the snake break right through those leaf shapes of mine even though I went
through and I packed a little white on top of them just to knock them back a little
bit, which that is fairly effective.
Inevitably, those lines are gonna push back through, even
after the color's in there.
You're gonna see those lines to some extent.
Like I said, you can't let perfection get in the way of progress.
You do the best you can in these, in these situations, and this was just the
best thing that I could come up with.
And then in that second and final session I went through, laid my
color right on top of those grays.
I used a.
Pretty simple color palette straight color because those grays are going
to mute the color a little bit.
So I laid these purples in on the snake and I laid some pretty rich
purples, knowing that when it heals, it's gonna fall back in that black that
gray wash under it is gonna, is gonna come through and, and mute some of
those shadow shapes down a little bit.
And that's what you're seeing here.
Now you see the.
Gray from the end of the first session and then the fresh color
from the end of the second session.
Unfortunately, I don't have a healed photo.
I haven't seen this tattoo again, completely healed, but I'm pretty happy
with how it turned out at the end of it all though my biggest challenges
weren't the the technical ability of the previous tattooer or they
had nothing to do with those lines.
They had a lot more to do with the lack of relationships between the shape of
the client's body and the shapes of the snake of the design itself, and how
they just didn't work together at all.
And if you pause this and you zoom in and look at those roses, you'll see
that I, I never solved that problem.
Those shapes were so harsh.
So wonky and just off that, I just had to do the best to distract
from them by using really strong contrast in creating a strong light
source on the body of the snake.
So you'll notice that the body of the snake has my darkest
darks and my light of its light.
So my strongest value contrast right there, which just by its very nature,
will draw the viewer's eyes there.
So my job in this case was since I couldn't really solve the problem of
the roses and the leaves that I drew in are gonna have some hint of the old
lines kind of cutting through them.
What I did basically was I said, Hey, viewer, don't look at these.
Look over here.
So I'm distracting more than I'm actually covering up by using really
strong contrast in the body of the snake and a and a strong light source, and
making sure that I have a lot of volume.
Kind of in the, in that cylinder of the body making that the most interesting
part of the design kind of distracts the viewer from the other issues that
I just wasn't able to completely solve.
So, just a couple of key takeaways.
If you find yourself in this kind of situation, The main thing is to
communicate early and clearly with the client to let 'em know that, you know,
this thing won't be as good as if it, if I had done it from the start, but 75% of
people will never know that once it's all healed and settled, I'm sure that all of
her friends now look at this piece and think that it's a really nice piece, and
they don't notice all of the things that we've talked about here in this episode.
But beyond that, you just have to be willing to let some things go,
do the best you can with them, and establish a hierarchy within the
design and make sure that you know this is the part that I can save.
This is the part I can make the best.
I can drive attention to this area so that and I can distract from the
other areas that aren't quite as good.
I hope this episode was helpful.
I hope you got something out of it.
If so, please share it with anyone that you think might find it useful.
Appreciate your support of the Fireside Tattoo Network and we'll
catch you in the next episode.