Practice, Flare, and the Dummies

June 18, 2018

Lloyd and Harry got put on an inner thigh today, riding their scooter next to the big Jim Carey portrait I did a few years ago. I should have grabbed a picture of the Harry portrait on the other side, but after 3.5 hours, my client and I were anxious to part ways. We decided to flip the design so that they were riding towards the front of his body.

Last night I did some practicing. I am really glad I have the Tattoo practice app. I wanted to try doing some large shading with the machine slowed down and quicker hand movements, then compare them to the machine running very fast with moderate hand movements. I practiced with yesterday’s tattoo design that I did on a woman’s leg.

And after that I practiced with a Marilyn Monroe design which I will be tattooing on a lady this week. I wasn’t super excited about the results with the Marilyn piece so I might try again.

One persistent issue I have been noticing in my actual tattoos is more ink flaring – mainly around areas that I have done solid fill work. All my black fill areas where I really saturated the ink in the scooter tattoo today had flare. I’m going to try slowing down the machine when I do ink packing and see if that helps. I’ve also been giving some thought to checking out the new FK Irons Spectra machine. It supposedly is built to have some give in the needle punch – similar to coil machines. I will have to check the finances and see if I can get one soon.

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