The real ingredients for a great tattoo
Let’s focus on one of the most important aspects of both the consultation and design process: body mapping. Designing a tattoo that looks beautiful from all angles is a challenge, especially when you consider how movement affects a tattoo. This is especially important for all sleeve designs.
Whether you’re just starting out as a tattoo artist, or you’re experienced but want to try new styles and shapes, there are some things you may overlook. In this article, we’ll discuss sleeve design using the Fireside Hybrid Method, which uses both analog body mapping and digital drawing techniques. We’ll also briefly discuss different ways of thinking about what’s important in tattoo sleeve design, such as the placement of elements.
The Importance of a Good Tattoo Sleeve Design
“No matter what angle a viewer looks at the sleeve from, they’ll see something interesting.”
– Jake Meeks
To design a tattoo accurately on a body part, you must first take into account that different people have different shapes for that part of their body. Everyone’s arms, legs, and torso are different shapes, so it’s important to keep that in mind when designing your tattoo.
The second is the individual elements and how they interact and flow within the design. No matter where the viewer is standing, there needs to be a focal point that draws them in and makes them want to approach the client and ask questions.
Mapping Tattoo Designs: Analog vs. Digital
analog
Analog has many advantages when you can be in front of your customers in your tattoo shop, and if you are developing a mapping style for your tattoo sleeves, this is probably the best way to ensure you don’t miss out on your customers’ unique body shapes.
To be precise, use shapes and colors to draw the location of specific landmarks on the body — for example, circles for bones, squares or pluses for depressions, and triangles for bends and joints — and don’t forget to note any scars your client may have forgotten to mention.
Designing a tattoo sleeve to your exact measurements ensures that the design will fit your body perfectly, eliminating the need for guesswork on whether an element will fit in a particular area.
The drawbacks of drawing completely analogue include speed (depending on the artist), tracing paper noise, and the clutter when dealing with large designs such as backs. This is exactly where digital comes in handy.
Digital
Although digital tattoo designs don’t offer perfectly accurate body maps, they make up for it with efficiency and convenience.
For example, taking several photos of a client from different angles and compiling them into a panel can help the client visualize what the tattoo will look like on their body from different angles, and isolating the focal point can also help make each section of the tattoo completely unique to that area of ​​skin.
Going digital has many advantages, but it also has disadvantages. One thing to consider is how difficult it is to assemble the various panels and line up all the elements correctly. Most experienced tattoo artists can guess pretty accurately where every element will be, but when a customer comes, they might have to reprint and slightly misalign things to get it perfect.
Also, if you’re a tattoo artist with out-of-state clients, you know how hard it can be to get good photos from your clients. Even if your client is willing to help you take a decent photo, many of them don’t take into account lighting, angles, etc., so you might not get the perfect angle you need. Giving examples usually makes this process easier, but it really all comes down to luck.
Hybrid method of tattoo sleeve design
Now that you have a basic idea of ​​how to use these methods individually, let’s combine them to really take advantage of the best parts of both techniques.
As I mentioned earlier, you will need to make some marks to indicate the areas you want to target. First, you mark the client’s skin, then you duplicate the marks on tracing paper so that you can pinpoint and record problem areas, such as the armpits or wrist bones.
Then lay it flat on the ground or tape it securely to a wall and take a clean, even, stable photo of the body trace with your cell phone or digital camera.If you already have a panel image of your client’s body, upload the body map as a layer into the digital drawing program you use.
Now I will be able to render the tattoo design onto the client’s panel image. Since it is still in the early stages, I will start with a simple black and white rendering of the design to give me an idea of ​​how I want the piece to be laid out.
At this stage in the process, it’s still difficult to figure out exactly how each panel will translate on the body – I need to start connecting the panels together so that I can create a cohesive, beautiful outline from these images, rather than a patchwork stencil job for my client.
Breaking down the barriers between analog and digital tattoo design
Once the tattoo design is rendered, outline the four panels onto separate layers so you can move them around if needed. Then turn on the body map layer and drag the outlines to stitch them together. Draw transitions between sections and adjust the shapes to fit your map perfectly.
Once you trace, you not only get the outline, but also all the markings of the body landmarks, so you can make any changes necessary to avoid problem areas like bones or odd places like grooves, etc. You now have a perfect mapping and no more guessing where everything will be placed on your client’s body.
Improve your stencil making skills and spend more time tattooing
“Learning how to map and stencil the body accurately will allow you to become an efficient tattoo artist.”
– Jake Meeks
The final step is to place the stencil on the client. The stencil has a marker on it so you can make a guess, but it’s important to take a little extra time to be precise. Using a light-colored pencil, mark the areas of your client’s body that you want to represent, lining up your mark with the mark on the stencil.
I did all this prep work up front to really hone the stencil design. It almost erased an hour and a half I would have spent prepping, printing, testing, and drawing to the client. Creating the entire stencil in advance gives me plenty of time and space to properly progress the piece.
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The Fireside Tattoo Network is home to the Fireside podcast, the Fireside Technique video series and the Fireside Weekly blog.
The Fireside Tattoo podcast is hosted by veteran tattoo artist Jake Meeks. Tune in to episodes where we debate, discuss, and philosophize about everything from tips for artists of all levels to trends in the tattoo world. Many guest artists have sat down for interviews and in-depth conversations, with many more planned, so check back often.
The Fireside Tattoo Overview video series provides short, in-depth videos packed with helpful information to help artists understand the science and nuances of tattooing so they can make more informed decisions and improve their work. We often cover some of the more technical topics from the Fireside podcast and film narrated time lapse videos that go into great detail about how Jake or a featured artist tackles a particular problem.
