Tattoo Blog

Gray Wash Tutorial

October 26th, 2007

So a lot of people ask me how I do my gray wash, be it customers or other artistswapping techniques. So I’m going to talk about how I did the elephant.

No matter how well someone shows you or tells you how to do it, this is all based on technique and artistic ability.
Your graywash won’t get any better without practice.

So first here are the tools I used:

Two machines but, three would be better- Liner and shader and a second shader would be ideal

Needles- 7RL 14RS and a 9 Mag

Ink caps-one #9 cap for black one #12 large for my wash

Kuri Sumi black outline ink and graywash

Any gray wash piece is usually intended for stuff with a lot of detail because there is no color to flash it up.
That’s excludes lettering or names of course where a little fade is added with wash.

When my friend said he wanted an elephant I asked if he wanted real or Illustrative when he said real
I told him Black and gray would make it look really nice. When you intend to do a super complicated or
realistic piece it all comes down to Reference, Reference, Reference! If you have a shitty reference you
will have a shitty tattoo no matter how good you are because it will look like you made shit up.

Since he found the pic he liked it made my life easier because I didn’t have to draw it up.
Now if he wanted a real elephant but couldn’t find a pose then I or he would have supplied me with at least
5 different elephant photos so I could make up the pose and have it look correct like it was from a photo.

Here is the photo he gave me from All Posters, it was huge and I could zoom in to see the detail.
And when printed it wasn’t pixeled.

I printed the original out and then made a tracing of it. I made a complete contour outline of the elephant.
Then I outlined wherever there was a big shape like the legs, head and ears and where ever the darkest spots where,
like the wrinkles and huge shadow underneath. I had to draw through the baby elephant to make the
missing leg then I applied the stencil

With realistic pieces there isn’t a lot of outline to use so this is where artistic ability comes in.
If you put hard lines in places where there shouldn’t be on a realistic piece you’re going to show
you draw at a fifth grade level and your skills are best left at flash or shop janitor.

I use my Inks straight, black I don’t dilute because I’ve grown to trust Kuri Sumi.
I use the gray straight from the bottle I don’t dilute. If you know what your doing it is light enough to get
a very faint gray out of the bottle and it will build up to about an 80% black no problem.

If it’s darker then you want then you need to practice. When you dilute you never get a consistent shade.
Work on your technique not the ink, with ink like this it’s more pilot error then equipment malfunction.
Try slowing your machine down and building your way up. It should take awhile before you overwork
the skin where it won’t take ink.

Then as you get comfortable you can speed your machine up. I can run both my machines at the same speed
for shading as I line. I just know how the ink is going in and I’m fast enough where I get the desired effect
I want without blotches.

Here is the first stage of doing the tattoo. I only used black for the outline and the eyeball, THAT’S IT!
Everything else is graywash . I keep the lines simple because the whole piece is based on shading.

I then switched to my 14rs because now I’m done with my true black and I need to shade.
The 14RS is great because it doesn’t allow you to do hard lines unless you’re don’t know
what you’re doing. You can build up layers like doing a pencil drawing. You can render out
certain things and it won’t show scratchy marks of ink in the skin, I used it for the face detail
and wrinkles. I did the outline in a black because grey wash can fade out to where the eye just
travels around but with a hard contour you keep the eye in the tattoo.

After I did some rendering I switched to my 9 MAG to do some serious coverage and shading.
When working with a mag I do whip shading and circle shading. If you want a mice gradient you whip shade.
I hold my machine at a 45 degree angle and work from the hard line out. If you work from where you want
the fade to end in you will get blotchy shading and if you whip out while holding your needles backwards it will be patchy too.

These are all basic techniques and this can be applied to anything when it comes to tattooing gray wash. All that’s left is honing your drawing and applications skills.

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