 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to focus on doing detailed tattoos. So here I've got three colors, Bugman's Glow, Dark Blue, and Payne's Gray. Don't worry, I'll write them down. You can see they're all in the palette here and I've mixed all three of them as well as some Flow Improver into a nice mix. We're going to be tatting up our giant. This is obviously one of the gargants out of the from Age of Sigmar and the first thing I did was make a nice smooth, well flowing mixture. That's why you always want to use an ink. So as I'm drawing here, you can watch as I'm going, but I'm going to explain the basic principles and then we'll talk about what I'm doing. So when you want to set up a very detailed tattoo, something like what I'm doing here, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you have some kind of reference photo to go off of or a good clear image in your head or you've drawn it out on a piece of paper or whatever. In this case, I actually just googled some images of Aquaman's tattoos from the movie Aquaman and I really liked kind of this sort of Maori triangle pattern type thing that he had. And I thought it was cool how it kind of looked like shark's teeth, like kind of like a shark's jaw there. So I thought I would expand on that idea. So once you've got your concept, the key is with any big detailed complicated tattoo, just like any piece of freehand, is to not try to draw the whole thing at once. So you break it down into constituent tiny elements. So you notice here I wanted to do all of these, these what we would think of as dags, these little teeth, right? So I started by drawing one thin line. Then I thickened that line up. Then I started applying triangles. Then I drew another line over the top and now I'm going to start putting triangles alternating over the open area below that. So basically each point of the lower triangle leads up to the line of the next triangle. The reason I can do this is twofold, like why I can be this precise with the paint is twofold. First, because I mixed in an ink. Second, because I mixed in flow improver. Ink and flow improver are really essential if you want to do nice, sharp, thin lines. If you filled the pen on your desk with acrylic paint, it wouldn't really flow so well, right? So you want to include that ink because it's thin. It flows well. It's meant for this sort of purpose. Now, as to the colors I use, this is a good generic tattoo color. A nice dark blue, something like Payne's Gray, which is blue-black, and then a little bit of a deep flesh color. And you want to make sure you're mixing in some kind of flesh tone. In this case, I picked Bugman's Glow. I like it. It's a nice deeper flesh color. I find it works really well to sort of mix in some of it into your tattoo color. The more of it you mix in, the more faded the tattoo will look. So that's the key. What you're doing by mixing in a little flesh is ink from tattoos sinks into the skin. By mixing in the flesh tone, you give that impression even with only one layer of paint. Now, we'll talk at the end about how you can continue to build that up. But you see how all I've done here is just continually draw a thin line, put the triangles on top in an alternating pattern, and then draw another thin line over the top of that. This is really easy. Like, the tricky, the wonderful part about big, complex patterns is that they're so complicated, your brain won't actually notice small inconsistencies. When you add enough visual confusion to the pattern, it just, your brain makes it correct, OK? It also helps if the pattern isn't completely regular. Like, that is to say, you would probably notice if it was a big grid, and there was one line slightly off, but you'll notice a lot less if it's something with angles and curves and unusual shapes like this one, OK? So, as I said, I looked at the Aquaman tattoo and decided to use that as sort of a reference, but I wasn't making that my ultimate guide. So the goal was to be, use that as a starting point, but I ultimately liked the idea of like a shark's teeth coming up into a wave kind of pattern. So I just decided to have it follow the curve of the shoulder there, and then you'll see how I then make the thin lines of the wave extend. So the goal here is I'm just drawing these thin lines, connecting them around. Now, I just want to take a couple moments to like talk about my general process here and things that you have to be aware of. First off, so the other thing besides the well-flowing ink and paint and stuff like that you need is you want to make sure you have a real nice sharp tip brush with a decent belly on it. So I'm not using the smallest brush in my collection or anything like that. I'm using something of a decent size that has a good belly on it because you notice how long I want to keep painting. I also, you can see how I try to always be doing this in one continual stroke. You want to avoid any kind of like hashing at it, where you're stabbing and then moving and stabbing and then moving as much as you can. So you see how I try to consistently draw a line as much as possible. Sometimes there'll be a break or I'll need to change angles like there. For the most part, I'm trying to avoid that sort of thing. The next thing I'll say is as I build this up, what I'm doing is just making decisions based on what's already there on the tattoo and where do I want to go from that point? So in other words, I kept looking back at my reference photo and looking at some of the shapes and the forms that they had for like Aquaman's tattoo, right? And I said, okay, well, how can I integrate that? And I noticed they had like a lot of these long swooping lines and these alternations between thick and thin lines. And I think that's a really compelling look for a tattoo like this. The more of those little thin lines you add, mixed in with the thicker lines, the more it will add to that sense of visual confusion and distract people from any minor inconsistencies in your work, okay? So the other thing I'll say is as you're sort of thinking about this, you always want to be sort of trying to build out like a center mass and then have it come down into sharp, interesting edges. So you see how I'm sort of building this thing out and slowly reducing the amount of real estate, as it were, I guess, on his body that I'm taking up. And that's because as you draw that down, again, it will create that more dynamism to it. So in this case, I started with this big sweeping arcs and then I've slowly added more and more of these small areas I'm drawing down into a thinner and thinner area. Now, the key is you can then build that back up. So in this case, I'm only going to do so much of this on camera, but you could always go farther than that. So I could take this thin one and then bring it back out into a larger shape down the side of his torso going down into his pants or something. I could have it meet with a similar wave reaching off of his shoulder and then extend the whole thing onto his back. And it would be the exact same process. It would just be me continuing to add these lines to follow the patterns that I've set up. And if you're working from a real life example, it shouldn't be too difficult to just keep looking at other elements of that example and build it out. The idea here in its simplest form is that the more you keep adding to the complexity of the design through one line at a time, one triangle, one stroke, one hash, one move of the ink, the pen around there, the more you'll build a pattern that's complex enough that people don't really notice any minor inconsistencies. But that being said, sometimes you might feel a need to change something or clean something up. So what do you do if you want to clean something up? Well, fortunately, that's really easy. One of the most important elements of freehand, one of the things that has to be internalized about doing freehand is two things. First, you're not done immediately because you draw a section of what it is. You'll notice multiple times here that I go back, that I correct things, that I change lines, that I reinforce a triangle, that I touch an area I've already touched. This is where it becomes really hard to work on this on camera, by the way. You'll notice that I slightly alter shapes, that I extend lines, that I will draw things up to other places from where they were before. That's a really critical piece. So the first thing is if you go slightly outside the line on an area, maybe you can just make that suddenly a transition into a thicker line. Alternating your lines from starting very thin and then swooping out into something bigger, like you see me do a couple times there, is actually a really nice looking aesthetic. And again, it's one of those things because you're creating movement, because you're creating directionality, it will still add to the overall visual confusion and prevent people from noticing any consistency. But sometimes you can't do that. So all you have to do is go back to your flesh tone. Find whatever flesh tone is close to where you're working. And it doesn't need to be exact. This is, I think, one of the things that scares people when you do this over a blend like this. They're like, oh, if I mess it up, I'm never gonna be able to fix it. Yeah, you can. Like if I messed up here somewhere and wanted to correct it, I would just grab whatever flesh tone I thought was relatively close, doesn't have to be right on, and I would just correct that tiny spot where the ink went over where it shouldn't. Okay? And that's it. That's all you gotta do. Because that small of an area, that tiny little space, no one's gonna notice. No one's gonna notice if the flesh color is slightly inconsistent, okay? So as we're coming down to the end here of the design, I wanna review kind of the key elements. First, a good standard tattoo color is gonna be opposed to the skin color. So if you're working with a standard Caucasian skin tone, then something in the blue-black is gonna be nice because that's contrasting to the orange of the skin. So in this case, I used a dark blue paint. I used Payne's gray ink, mixed it with Bugman's to make it seem a little faded. The more flesh you integrate, the more faded the tattoo will look. Ink and flow aid are important because they let the paint wick off your brush very easily. Two, use a real-life reference. Find something you can draw inspiration from. There's thousands and thousands and thousands and millions of pictures of cool tattoos online. Use those. Lastly, it's about building up small, simple elements over and over again. So there you go. I hope you liked that. If you did, hit the like button. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. But as always, I thank you very much for watching this one and we'll see you next time.