Hey, this is Jake with the tattoo improvement network.
Welcome to Fireside Technique.
On today's episode, I will share with you three ways to build up your line weights.
We hope you enjoy
Okay.
Just going to show you guys why we're in this tattoo.
Um Uh, a couple of different techniques for building up line weights
Typically, I wait and build up line weights at the end of my tattoos, but
AJ doesn't live in town.
He's going to be gone for a while.
We're only doing one work today, and I don't want it to look scratchy.
For months on end until he gets back in.
So I'm going to build up a few of these lines.
I want to start with the owl head.
I want to show you just a couple of ways that I go about it.
You can do it.
You can either run a line like so right on top of my first pass line
and then run a line right beside it. Uh,
to kind of double your line weight
till like so that works pretty
well if you really want to beef it up a lot more than that.
Another way that I.
Handle it is to move down here.
This is to actually scumble, make small circles,
and you can build it up more and you can build it up faster
this way than just running parallel or lines side by side.
You'll get a similar effect.
So one thing that you have to look out for whenever you run it, whenever you
build up the line by scumbling, sometimes you'll end up on this outer edge with
you can see some of those scumbles.
So in this case, I did a pretty good job. You can't see them,
but what you can do if you decide to scumble
is just go back on the outside of that of your scumbled line and build up.
And this this works better if you're trying to really, really beef up a line.
Like if I wanted it twice as thick as that, I might scumble it up.
Just doing it to this thickness right here, just running the line side by side
seems to work
just as well and doesn't take quite as long.
There's not a right or wrong way, just one or whichever you'd rather. Use
another one.
Find a way that you can do the same thing is,
yeah, if you're trying to really beef a line up, kind of.
Like scumbling.
You can run
run your lines far enough outside.
That you have skin tone in between the two lines.
And then you can actually fill in between
just a few ways that I go about building up line work.
That's pretty crazy.
To watch you do all three of those and they all came out identical
Yeah, yeah.
And so there's no right or wrong.
It's just whatever you want,
whatever's your hand feels better doing.
See what a difference that makes bumping those lines up, how much it pushes away
from the other lines around it.
And that's why I typically use it.
If you want to pull back or did you go back
and see that kind of see to how it looks with the whole thing,
just how that ear stands out so much more than everything else.
So when we talk on the podcast about building up your line weights,
that's what we're talking about.
You can create a lot of weight, push something
either back in the background or forward in the foreground.
Just what line weight alone.
Um, so it's always something to keep in mind.
There's another example scumbling.
Around a little line on the outside
and there's another example of just pushing a line next to a line.
But as you can see, I've got a little space in between.
Those right there, so I'll come back
right in between, fill in the middle.
One more thing I'll show you while we're in
this is if you wanted to taper a line from thick to thin, how you might do that,
I'll do it on a smaller one here.
The same idea.
You could either scale on to this line to be really heavy,
and I wanted to thin down by the time I got down to the end.
I don't really want it to do that on this but I can show you.
I can either start with.
A line outside the line
and then slowly pull it into that original line and then fill.
The two see how get that space between,
uh, I can fill in between those two
just slow making tiny,
tiny circles and slowly coming
out of those circles to see how that tapers
or you could literally, I mean,
if you're confident, you could scumble, scumble, scumble, scumble,
tighten your scumble, tighten your scumble and do all that
and one pass, if that makes any sense.
If if you'd rather if you don't feel comfortable doing that,
running the two lines side by side works really well and then filling in between
and and you can always build those up more if you need to do that now.
So you can lines.
How I do lines.