Hey. Welcome to the fireside.
My name is Jake, and this is 3 minutes to better tattooing.
It's good to be back with you guys.
It's been a little while
since we put out any content at all, and I don't have a good reason for that.
We just haven't done it
but I was working on a tattoo recently, and I thought to myself, this.
This could be a good three minute to better tattooing episode.
So I recorded it, and here we are.
The point of today's episode,
and it may run a little longer than 3 minutes
because I want to give a little bit of backstory on how I ended up making
these decisions and ended up in this predicament,
but the the focus of this episode
is on the importance of having just a little bit
of an understanding of color theory, particularly complementary colors
and in analogous colors, and how you might use those two palettes
to serve you differently, to serve different purposes.
So let's go ahead and jump over to the content.
And I will start with a little bit of a backstory on how we ended up here.
So this is what my client, Chris, came in with.
This was back 2019, 2020.
He had this tattoo for about 12 or 15 years, and it was never finished,
obviously, and he wanted me to finish it out, rework it, and just make it pop.
So I really didn't do a lot.
I used the
existing kind of color palette.
These yellows going oranges.
I wasn't crazy about the green line work, so I found the solution for that.
And let me go ahead and show you back a couple of years ago,
what I ended up doing
with the piece.
So here's a little bit of a before and after
and you can see I basically just grabbed what was already there.
I wasn't crazy about these like hybrid spider flowers.
So I made my focal point, the center of the piece.
That's where my strongest contrast is.
And I just used to I just used the the existing yellows
pulled out to those oranges
and then pulled that into a deep kind of burgundy, red, almost brick red.
And then I finished up and added connected to some of the existing work around his
around his shoulders and into his back piece and into his arms.
So that was done.
Like I said, I think we finished this in March of 2020.
And even at that time he was talking about extending it down a little bit.
I can show you that
he...
when we finished it, you can see that it was
this was actually before it was finished, which you can see how we finished
it kind of flat down here at the bottom.
And neither of us were crazy about how flat it was.
And he had talked about even at that time,
getting a blue tarantula was the spider that he wanted
and he wanted to drop it down a little lower.
And so I thought, well, that would be easy enough.
Blue and orange are complementary colors, so I'll just pull this either
depending on the size of the spider, which I'm thinking
we were probably doing it somewhere around
two to three inches, like something comparable to these spiders
just to kind of pull the piece down into more of a V.
And I thought, depending on how far down it went, I would either continue this
brick, red, deep color or I would transition back to the oranges
and have orange behind the the blue.
And then that would help that that tarantula to kind of pop out a little bit.
And, and that would be the, you know, the, the way that I would handle the piece.
So here's where things change for me pretty drastically.
We scheduled the appointment I went through
and I found a blue tarantula that I kind of liked
the position that it was in something you were kind of looking down at.
And I thought it fit well with the composition.
So I found the blue tarantula we show up to do the tattoo.
And as we're kind of playing around with the size
Chris, the client decides that he wants to do it
massive and use the bulk of his stomach for this tarantula.
So that really changes its relationship with the with the existing tattoo.
So what I did, instead of dealing with the background at all in that sitting is
I just dropped the tarantula in the size that he wanted
and, and I just placed it in the center of his stomach.
And this is how far we got on that sitting.
And I thought, OK, I'm going to need to readdress how I pull
this existing piece into this new piece because the new piece,
just due to its size in general, just, just due to its size,
is going to completely overwhelm and dwarf the chest piece.
And like I mentioned, the chest piece here is now about two years old.
So it's settled in.
But you can see my focal point is still standing strong.
It was this hardest kind of contrasty area so what I want to do now
is I don't want to completely lose this
as a focal point and where this just completely overwhelms it.
So the last thing that I decided I wanted to do was to draw more attention
by using a complementary color palette.
I thought, I'm going to have to find a better solution.
So let's cut over to the second session, the follow up
session to this, and let me show you what I decided to do instead.
So the first thing I did is I kind of like and drew some webs that I thought
transitioned well from the existing webs just with a light gray wash or blood line.
And then second I came in and I tried to approximate that
brick, that deep reddish black color that's down there at the bottom
so that I can transition out of it smoothly
because like I said, it's a couple of years old now,
so I want to find that color, that tone and transition out of it.
But rather than going back into the orange,
which I would have done if the spider had been small, I decided to transition
into an analogous kind of color palette to the blue tarantula.
So you can see I'm moving into purple here now, so I'm going from the deep reds
to more of a magenta and then into a straight purple.
So this right here is where you're seeing the transition from the brick red
into my darkest kind of warm purple, reddish purple.
And the reason that I chose to do this is an analogous color palette,
meaning that
the colors that are next to the blue, I know the tarantula is going to be blue,
so the colors next to the blue purples will be what surround it
so that it comes out a little more softly from the background.
So check this out.
I, I skipped down, I started to introduce those dark purples
and then I skip to the very bottom where the background web meets the tarantula
and I introduce the purple that I think I want right up against those blues.
And so the reason that I did that is I wanted to make sure that I got
to the color that I wanted, and I wasn't still too dark as I'm transitioning down.
So I jump to the bottom.
And then I worked that purple back up into the kind of magenta in the brick red.
So you can see that part is finished now and I'm going to go through
and just start laying in my deepest shadow
blues in the in the tarantula.
So even now, before we finish this and you can kind
of visualize the difference and coming from
that purple into the blues, which is kind of a soft transition
as opposed to going back into those burnt oranges
and then introducing the blues where that where that spider would have really stood
off of those oranges really starkly due to the size of the spider,
I didn't want to draw any more attention to it.
It's going to draw plenty of attention as it is just because of its size.
So I felt like adding the orange background
and using the complimentary color palette would have been overkill.
It would have been too much.
Whereas the the soft transition from the purples to the blues, that
analogous color palette kind of allowed it to come out like more atmospherically.
So this is how far we got in the in that second session.
I didn't quite do the
the highlights in the in the blues, and I didn't get to do the webs themselves.
They're still skin tone.
But but you can see that, if you can picture what the orange would look like,
you can see how this was a smoother and softer kind of kind of transition.
And I'm happy with it.
I think it was a think it was a good decision.
So here we are on a final session, which turns out not to be a final session.
We're actually
going to do a little more down his ribs to kind of tie everything together further.
But I went ahead in this session and I, I transitioned
those magenta is a little further up and kind of
kind of went over the top of those brick reds
so that that transition from the old tattoo to the new tattoo is smoother.
It's always nice to get a second pass on, you know, a healed tattoo.
And then I went through and I just laid my light blues
in the light side of the shape on the actual spider.
And then finally, I'm coming through here and I'm grabbing that green that I used
in the original tattoo, and I'm pulling it the rest of the way down.
And I'm not making a transition with that at all.
I want that to be kind of what ties the entire thing together.
So I want that green to be consistent from top to bottom
in just that background behind the web is what is transitioning.
But if you look at this, all that I've done is I've followed
the spectrum of color.
So I just kind of followed the rainbow.
I went from this yellow to an orange to a red to a magenta to a purple to a blue.
So that's exactly how color would follow a
a color wheel.
And here is the final kind of still shots of the of the tattoo.
And I'm pretty happy with it.
Like I said, we are going to come through.
And if I come back over to this, we are going to come through and
and where these negative
where these negative leaves and things like that are, I'm
going to color those and pull those down so that the V goes a little further out.
Right now, it feels a little bit narrow to me the way that it was finished out.
But I'm going to I'm going to come through and just grab these and just tie that
in on either side.
So we will need one more session.
But overall, I'm pretty happy with the transition.
I like the piece as a whole.
I think that even though the new spider doesn't look like it was done
at the same time as the other spiders, it obviously is a separate piece.
I feel like it's kind of harmonious the way that the colors transition
from the warm to the cool.
And then I like the way that the purple is transitioned into the blues.
I think it was much more impactful and a little more,
I don't know, sophisticated.
I don't know.
I've been using that word more lately with tattooing,
but it looks a little smarter to me than than using the
the orange in the background and then the blue foreground.
That seemed a little bit like it might be a little bit obvious,
and it definitely would have been overkill for drawing attention to this spider.
The last thing that I wanted was to use a spider, a shape that's three
times the size of everything else, and then use a strong complementary color
palette to reinforce it even more so that it completely overwhelms
the existing tattoo, which I would like, you know, to still get some attention
in the in the piece overall. So that's it.
Probably way more than 3 minutes, but I hope you enjoyed it.
Make sure you go over to firesidetattoo.com,
sign up for our mailing list and keep up with where we're going, what we're doing,
when these episodes are coming out.
And make sure to let me know in the comments if you
if you like that color palette, if you feel like this episode was helpful,
if you'd like other color related episodes like this
or if you would have done something different, you know,
if you think the complimentary color palette would have worked better,
feel free to to throw your ideas out there.
I feel like a lot of times people get more out of the comments and the suggestions
below these YouTube videos than they do the videos themselves.
A lot of times there's a lot of great ideas in these in these comments.
So thank you, guys, as always, for supporting what we do.
And I'll catch you in the next one.