Light and shade in tattoo’s

[Tarantula]

What are people’s thoughts on this?
I have the notion that a character should face the person being tattooed, I think most peple feel the same way, but what about lighting?
Shading obviously is ruled by the direction of lighting sothe directon of light for your tattoo is pretty important. When drawing / painting you can pretty much have your light source wherever you want but personally I don’t think the same is true with tattoos.

So here is the question: Lets say you’re tattooing a portrait (or even a koi japanese devil.. whatever) on someone’s left arm. To me I would have portrait facing to the right (looking at the customer) with lighting coming from the left (if it were on right arm all this would be reversed). In my opinion to give it a realistic feel the side closest to the body would be in shadow due to the body blocking light. What do you guys and gals think?

I’m currently having a “debate” with someone on this subject who feels that lighting doesn’t matter and that having 3 or 4 portraits on the same arm with different light sources is just fine…

[TexasPT]

I think the beauty of art is that there is no right way or wrong way.

For me I think the only rule would be that the light source is consistent on the individual tattoo. (I have seen some crazy shading) The one next to it could be from a completely different angle and that would be fine. Each portrait would be it’s own tattoo. Think of four portraits hanging on the wall…they may all have different light sources, right?

My .02
Mark

[Tarantula]

4 Painted portraits yes, they’re already been painted so theres not a lot you can do about light source. It takes 2 minutes to flip an image so it faces the other way so the light all hits the same side. I’m fairly sure the masters, if they knew artwork was going to hang side by side, would have painted them with the same light source.

[TexasPT]

but they masters are only masters because a group of people decided they were. I think there are more talented people out there who will never be masters because they never were put infront of the correct people to make it happen. I can’t stand some of the “masters” and I don’t like to read many of the “classics”. (there is an interesting literary essay from Calvino about what makes a classic a classic)

Art is personal preference and shouldn’t, in my opinion, be tied down by rules. If you want to put a panther tattoo on the neck of the mona lisa…tear it up.

I hear what you are saying and from a classically trained artist standpoint you are probably right and I understand your point completely. However…I think the rules needn’t be rigid or black and white.

Mark

[Author]

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