Bio-Hazard

My skills are improving! It's been difficult in the past in a few areas that I feel I've been getting some good practice in lately. Namely with this design were actually two items.

• Connecting shading/filling to the outline. Have you ever colored in a coloring book? Filling solid shapes in a tattoo are very similar. The main difference is that when you are using crayons, you are only mildly worried about going outside the lines. Even if you did, the consequences wouldn't be that dire, right? There's a common thing we beginners do where in order to not go outside that line and cause a permanent mistake on a person's skin, we tend to not even meet the line. It creates an odd line of normal skin inside the design. Anyway, I've been working to just be extra aware of where the needles are hitting and it's getting better. I can still see areas where I didn't get in this tattoo, but I'm very happy with how many lines I got dead on! The effort continues.

• Using magnum needles. My first experience with these was with the gigantic "strength" kanji. I used a 1 mag, which is two rows of needles, looking kind of like a small and dangerous paint brush. I couldn't get the ink to stick at all with it, so I've been scared of trying ever since. My mentor got me to try is again and I'll never turn back to filling large areas with a round bit. Never! It's amazing how well they work and get larger areas much quicker than anything else. This tattoo was filled with a 7 mag (one row of 4 stacked with one row of 3.