Today when I entered Rebel Tattoo’s doors, I was greeted by a new challenge. Until now, I’d only been working with standard liners or RL5’s as we call them. But today, I’d be working with “shaders.” Owen explained to me that I’m making a decent amount of progress fairly quickly with my progression, especially the steadiness in which I hold the tattoo machine, which I actually agreed with. I think that my years of illustration have granted me an aptitude in this area, and I’m happy that it’s proving to be so beneficial. However, when I began shading, that’s where things got a bit interesting. Shading with a tattoo machine is completely different from shading with a pencil or a marker. Due to the fact that you need to keep the tattoo machine practically completely straight to avoid differences in saturation and ink going into the wrong places, the technique required is quite unique. Owen and Morgan explained to me that in order to properly saturate my illustrations on fake skin and people alike, I’d need to keep the machine straight and move it in tiny circles over and over again. While it sounds fairly simple, I found it to be quite difficult initially and continued to struggle with it throughout the entire day. My days often looked like this. More often than not, I’d be presented with a new task or a new way to tattoo, and I’d focus on putting in as many hours as possible with the time that I had. I realized only a few days in that the majority of the reason that the people in the shop are so good at tattooing is that they’ve spent countless days grinding away and perfecting their craft, even if it meant staying after the shop had closed. It showed me that I’d need to do the same if I ever dreamed of being at their level or even better. So besides lunch and observing my fellow artists in the shop occasionally, I was glued to my desk, making sure that I kept at it. I appreciated this type of work because I know it’ll also be beneficial to honing my skills in my focus in COMD, which is illustration. As things are changing in the design world, digital art is becoming more and more prevalent. So I’m hoping that training my hand in this way will better allow me to use the pens and styluses in a more seamless manner.
