Hey. Welcome to the Fireside Tattoo Network.
My name is Jake, and this is 3 Minutes to Better Tattooing.
Today we're going to talk about
using white ink over healed black ink to knock it back.
And whether or not is even effective, why you might do it.
And I have a real life experiment from a tattoo of mine
that I did a couple of years back.
And we get to see it kind of settle in
and you get to make the decision on whether or not it worked, which is fun.
I have been watching YouTube videos with Max, with my ten year old
and all the YouTubers that he watches, they start their videos like
"what's up, guys?
Today we're going to talk about sick tats.
So make sure to ring that bell." And if you don't think 45 year old
men should be saying, sick tats, then let us know in the comments
What does ring the bell even do?
Does anyone know?
Isn't it just like subscribing or is it different than subscribing?
Do you ring the bell and subscribe or just one of the other?
If you know the answer to that, Leave us a comment.
All right.
Let's get to this episode.
So I'm going to kick it off here.
Unfortunately, I don't have
much video of this since I did this tattoo a couple of years ago.
Somehow the video is all
kind of either been deleted or it's on an old hard drive or something.
But here's what I got.
I got some I got some still shots.
This is what he came in with, this band, outer arm and then here was the inner arm.
Pretty dark it was pretty heavy, pretty saturated
and a little bit scarred around the coexist lettering.
It was somewhat raised.
Luckily, the rest of the band was not raised.
And originally I didn't have to deal.
I didn't think I was going to have to deal with that tattoo.
We were just going to do this kind of shoulder cap over onto a chest
and we were just going to like drop it straight
into the the existing tattoo.
And so I wasn't going to have to deal with it at all.
Of course, as soon as we start
the first block in sitting for the black and gray, the client, Jeff,
mentioned that he might want to cover the band and move past it.
So you can tell that I dropped short of actually touching the band
in this first session.
I, I let it fall short because I thought I might need
some of that space on the top side of the band
if we're going to move down his arm and that pain in me into a little bit of
a corner.
Just because if I had planned for the full arm
or a three quarter sleeve to begin with, I would have addressed this differently.
But since I had already planned for this kind of shoulder cap piece
to end right at that band, it it caused a little bit of trouble
trying to figure out how to work up into it.
So we ended up going with Hammerhead Sharks,
which I thought worked pretty well because I knew to cover that,
to cover that band, I was going to need some big beefy kind of chunky shapes.
And I thought the head of a hammerhead, I could kind of
like break that shape in half and do away with the horizontal
or at least break up that horizontal of the band a little bit.
And so you can see here that that's what I that's what I did.
Here's my first block in session on the lower arm, and I kind of set
the head of the shark at a three quarter angle so that it intercepted the
the band a little bit.
And I went and I scrubbed in the head
pretty well and just straight blacks and some gray washes.
And then you can tell here, this is
straight white over that black band when it's fresh.
So this is what it looks like at the end of the session when it was fresh.
And it looks like that white packed right over the top of the black.
Now, we all know if we've been tattooing a while that it doesn't hold that way.
It's not actually going to look like that, but it does affect it somewhat.
It will knock it back.
That white pigment sits right in there with that healed black pigment
and it does mute it.
It does knock it back maybe, you know, 15, 20%, something like that.
And then here it is
healed and you can see it held a little bit.
It looks, you know, it's obviously it's dingy, it doesn't look great.
But what I did hear in the,
the second sitting is I've got the healed white that went
straight over the top of the black
and it's kind of splotchy, but it did knock the black back a little bit.
And then I went in between on either side of the band
and I mixed just kind of a medium opaque gray
and I kind of lightly washed that in on it and pack it in super solid.
But what I'm trying to do,
it's almost like preparing a ground for a painting or something like that.
If you were to, people use like a raw umber
or something like that to tone a canvas so they don't have the white of the canvas
just so they have a consistent background that when they paint everything
that atmosphere, that background color kind of comes through.
That was kind of my thought process here is I didn't want the skin tone
in between the, the two black bands
to be super bright and light.
So what I'm trying to do
is just get all of that background stuff as close as I possibly can.
And obviously I didn't spend a ton of time on it.
You know,
I packed that white in as best I could and then I went through with that gray
and kind of approximated that medium healed tone of the white over the black.
And that's what I came up with here is the before of the inner arm,
and this is how I handled it after and healed on the inner arm,
after the grayscale, before we started any color.
And so you can see the same thing here. If you look on the top of the bicep,
I packed that white up against the compass.
And then where the compass intercepts the the cover up the band,
I kind of used the shadow shape and I saturated it pretty dark black.
So I'm just trying to break up that shape as best I can before we get to color.
And then here this is some of the only video that I have,
but this is about two and a half years healed.
I didn't want to put I actually intentionally held back on this video
because I didn't want to put this out whenever the color was fresh.
I didn't want to put it out when it was freshly, you know,
six months after healed or six weeks after healed.
I really wanted this to settle so we could see what it does in the real world.
And so this is about two and a half years settled
and it's a little bit rough in the background.
What you can tell here is that I, I used a blue
you know, kind of a teal or turquoise blue in the water, and then I went in
with like a warmer tone over the blacks on the Hammerhead's head.
So I let that black heal and then I went in with like,
this is probably like a dark magenta or brick red or some combination of, of
magenta and red so that I, I used a warm black to push forward in the shark's head.
And then I use the cool blue
the over the band in the cover up, hoping to create even more separation.
So every little time
I went at this thing, I tried to chip away and push and pull a little bit more.
So yeah, the first time just packing straight white over the band,
the second time approximating that medium gray and laying it in the skin
so that it soften the edges of the band.
And then in the color sessions, try to use a warm black
in the shark's head and a cool blue
in the water background water so that I can create even more separation
and you can tell I'll go back through a few more
still shots of the of the heel tattoo here.
There's still some issues it definitely is is heavy
it's dense on the bottom part of the arm and two light on the top part of the arm
that separation I don't love.
We're working on a full back piece now and I've had a couple of years
for this to settle in so we are going to go back through it
and see if we can even that out a little bit or balance the dark and light shapes
and I'll make sure to give an update whenever we actually do that.
I know this is way longer than 3 minutes.
Thank you guys so much for supporting what we do and we'll see you next time.