Selecting a Tattoo Artist: What to Expect When Getting Tattooed

Video Transcript

" Hi my name is Rick Wyckoff and you can check out our website at avatart2.com and I am here on behalf of Expert Village.com, and I’m talking about selecting an artist to do your tattoo. In most tattoo shops everybody who is an artist there should have a portfolio. Their body of work should consist of a variety of different kinds of work. I recommend going to a custom artist; somebody who draws and paints and does other kinds of art aside from tattooing and isn’t going to be relying on pre-made designs to create something for you. Ideally in their portfolio when you are looking at their work aside from having a wide variety of subject matter, the particulars that you are looking for are clean, bold line work. The line should be solid and smooth and black. They should not be lumpy, choppy or broken. The gradations of tone in each tattoo, each field of color should have a nice gradation of tone and shade through each field and then compositionally the piece of art work should do something to accentuate the person’s anatomy or interact well with the person’s anatomy. In other words, it should not look like a sticker that just got slapped on there. Some examples of better pieces: this large flowing coy fish. It has not only some of the basic flowing design elements that compliment the person’s anatomy but there is contrast and the composition of all these soft open fields versus the more dense or even solid black fields so that all the subjects tend to pop out. "