How to Get a Tattoo: Adding Base Color

Video Transcript

"HI, my name is Shotsie Gorman, I'm here as a professional tattoo artist forexpert village. Alright what we're doing now is we're going to start laying color. We've established our dark and our midtone area so we're going to go into color. Some of the color is going to overlap those areas. This is going to have a kind of muted green tone as well as down here and coming up into this side of the cavern. Then the brighter and lighter colors are going to fall down in between, so that it gives the appearance of looking out from inside the cavern to the water and landscape scene. So basically the process is very similar to adding the black and the gray, same machine same process, it's just that now we're working in color, so it'll be more decision making in terms of a painterly quality. We're creating an overlapping of the color into the black area, reinforcing a sense of being in the shadow. It's very similar to pastel work or oil painting, but in process probably closer to water color because you have to decide in advance where your lights are going to be, you can't go back in and tattoo a lighter area over a darker area. So all the highest values have to be decided before hand, because they have to be left open skin to add the lighter tones in. So in that way the process is more like water color than it is oil painting or pastel."