How to Shade A Tattoo

Wearing different Tattoos on the skin has become a style and youngsters love to add this style statement to their personality. Bombarded with various tattoo designs, you can always offer wider choice to your client to select any sample that goes well with their personality. It can include animal tattoos, flower tattoos, reptile tattoos, alien tattoos, cartoon character tattoos and so on.
Although tattoo designing is not very difficult but the shading technique involved in it is definitely complex. To ensure you achieve a meticulously designed tattoo on the skin that is free from all follies, you need to concentrate and be careful while shading. There are several points that you should keep in mind to get the right quality of shading on a particular tattoo. Following are some of the instructions which when followed carefully can be of great help to you.

Blending of Ink
Besides using the colored inks available in the market, you can always create new colors by blending ready-made inks. With practice, you will come to know how a new colored ink can be created by blending different colors and how dilution of ink can help you to get lighter shades and darker shades.

Making tattoo ink darker: To make a particular color or shade darker, you can add drops of black ink. You can go on increasing the content of black if you want darker shade. However, make sure that you don’t add too much of black at one go, especially if you want a subtle change.

Making tattoo ink lighter: To bring about lighter effect, drops of white ink should be us

ed. The lighter the shade you want, the more the white ink you require to add. Further, just like

black ink, add the white ink slowly and avoid using too much of white ink at once.
You can also experiment with adding a little distilled water to lighten the inks. This is method is especially used for grey washing a tattoo.

How to add shading effect

1. Firstly dip the needle in the colored ink. Now if you wish to create a lighter shade to your tattoo, then dip the needle in a little bit of water before piercing it into the skin. It will help the ink stay softer and will also not stick to the skin. It will lighten the ink color and will give the particular tattoo area a shaded effect.
2. Tilting of needle while piercing can also help creating certain effects. If you tilt the tattoo needle a bit, you will inject the ink at a different angle and this will make that specific area differ from the others.
3. Properly adjust the needle depth on the tattoo gun. If you wish to create darker shade, the depth of the needle should be more and if lighter effect is required then go for lesser depth. Depending upon the depth you select, the quantity of ink penetration will differ and hence different shading effects will be created.

Precautions

1. All the tools and surfaces used in the tattooing process should be thoroughly sterilized before you begin.
2. It is always better to use a new tube of lubricant for each tattoo to prevent spread of any disease or blood contamination.

Watch a video instruction on how to shade a tattoo

See also

How to Make Homemade Tattoo

How to Draw Animals

How to Make Your Skin Lighter

How to Tattoo Yourself