1. The art is kinda lame, sorry. It was a quick sketch up for this tut. The inspiration is the tattoo described in The Birth of Venus. I always thought it sounded sexy.
2. I use a full frontal image to do my drawing. When I'm done with the art phase, I'll cut and paste it to fit my meshes. Since there are great tutorials available on matching and placement, I didn't get into that here.
3. This tutorial is really about getting a level of realism into your tattoos.
Step 1
I use Photoshop, but these steps use tools available in any advanced drawing program.
In this step, I opened my body base to sketch on. If you're working from a blank canvas, you should at least have the mesh with one of RLC skins on it so you can keep the shape of the body parts in mind when you're drawing. A straight line will bell up or down when drawn across a thigh, shoulder blades will create angles in lines unless you have pretty full coverage, that kind of thing. You should try to work the shape of the figure into your design. I start by plotting my curves on the body using the Bezier tool.
Step 2
I always sketch in grayscale. That goes for anything, tats, clothes, skins. It's easier to color your work later. This way all the shading translates with your recolor. I'm using a 70% gray for my snake lines. In this step I'm just stroking the path I outlined and letting the program simulate pen pressure. I like to do that because it helps me sort out my light source and shadows a little easier.
Step 3
I copied my path and moved it over, correcting some of the jogs and repositioning the head lines to close up the shape.
Step 4
I've filled in some of the detail. The sketch is still rough, but the lights and shadow areas are sorted out, as well as position and the rough details of scales and body mottling. Some notes about light and shadows: in tattoo artistry, white is almost never used. Highlights are usually accomplished by using the base skin tone, or yellows, oranges and reds.
Since my snake is going to be green, I'm going to make sure my "lights" are just the base skin tone showing through with a little yellow to bump it up.
Step 5
Since my snake it going to end up green, I wanted to move my base to a sepia tone. (I saved the gray version out though, never know when I might want a blue or a red snake!)Brown will blend into the skin a little better than gray, and I can color burn and dodge to bring out the shading. To reinforce the details I just used the dropper to color match and retraced the hard lines (like the belly design and snake outline) after the color adjustment. Also, I hate the scribble scales so in the next pic you'll see I went back and actually took the time to draw some scales.
Step 6
Snake's done. Notice that I've color burned to deepen all the shadows, and really pick up the scale details. Then I took a smaller brush and highlighted those areas I really wanted the light to hit. Now for the head...
Step 7
The human-outline head is done and I've started to color it. I chose an analogous green color scheme (several shades of green) with van dyke brown and a muted red (like oxblood) for the tongue. This is sort of where you decide if this is a new tattoo, or if it's going to be something you've worn awhile. Colors mute out fairly quickly with tattoos, it doesn't take long to lose all but some red, blue and black pigments, and they'll all fade out heavily. A black tattoo will end up looking almost blue gray. Since the tattoo in the book was described as still being rather brilliant green, I decided to keep the palette fairly bright. Remember that the 'brightest' parts should be your skin.
Step 8
This was the fun part - coloring in. Just like a kids coloring book, paint in the lines!
result in world
