Freehand Skulls
1 comment June 5th, 2008
Today I worked on a soldier boy back home from Korea. He has a skull type sleeve going with various things intertwining. So our mission was to do some flames and skulls in Gray wash ALL freehand.
We talked about flaming the arm and then doing a bunch of little skulls but I thought that would be a waste of space so I suggested a bunch of little ones with one focal one looking back at you. He was really cool about giving me freedom to do what I thought would look best.
When you hand draw on the fly it’s almost as scary as trying to tattoo straight with no stencil. At least you can erase. When you are successful it’s vary rewarding. You don’t have the tattoo planned out and you are making it up as you go; knowing that you will be doing the tattoo minutes after drawing. Not giving you time to figure out all of the artistic problems.
When free handing you need to know what you are doing; I use two colored markers for this so I know where one layer begins and the other ends. Using a black sharpie isn’t smart. If you’re using black ink a thick sharpie line looses the line in the ink and you can be off. With colored markers you don’t loose sight of what you are doing.
Here is the colored construction lines and the final tattoo. I used a photo reference of a real skull for the shading. Using someone else’s drawing of a stylized skull won’t give you a realistic effect.
