Young people love to get inked because they see tattoos as a way to express their personal lifestyle. However, the price of tattoos designed by artists could be expensive, particularly for students. Rather than hiring a designer, why don’t you do it by yourself?
Even if you don’t have an aptness for drawing, you can do pretty much anything with a computer with a little finesse! No need to worry! Our ultimate comprehensive guide on how to design a tattoo on a computer will help you bring your imagination to life!
How To Design A Tattoo On A Computer By Yourself
Search For Inspiration
When it comes to any work of art, inspiration is indispensable to tap the energy and stimulate creativity. Tattoo design is the case, too!
Then how to get inspired? Well, you can browse the blogs of other tattoo artists or artwork designers to find the most suitable style for yourself.
Some popular sites include DeviantArt, The Dots, Dribble are where you can find references. Besides, you can visit popular social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter to influence your tattoo ideas as well.
It could be so challenging to find a design that covers every aspect you want. But when you’re making art, don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone. Hop up on your favorite art designs, do some tweaking, be creative, and make sure you do in-depth research before starting to work!
Create Your Own Models, Fonts, and Color Palette
After you have found your inspiration, it’s time to visualize it in your head. It’s important to convey your visions to pictures, paintings, or other types of designs. You can try drafting your ideas in illustration applications with a few pictures to demonstrate them.
On top of that, font styles, sizes, and colors will decide whether your artwork will have a soul or not.
Typically, graphic design software on the computer consists of hundreds of font styles for you to pick from. To obtain the best result, you can experiment with different fonts, colors, and letter sizes. Please remember to choose matching fonts and letter styles so that your outcoming result will look harmonizing. The more creative you are, the doper your tattoo will be.
Keep in mind that you should mix the colors according to your skin tone. With fair skin, you can choose light colors like pale blue or white. On the other hand, orange, red, blue, and green will look great for those who have medium skin.
Particularly, if you own a darker skin tone, the best mixture of colors for your tattoos is dark green, blue, and red. Since light-colored tattoos fade easily on darker skins, you can consider getting a black and grey tattoo. The black color will highlight your skin even more.
Modify And Rearrange Existing Designs With Apps
You might be questioning: “Where and how do I draft out my tattoo design?”. Stay cool; these are applications that help you sketch, modify, or rearrange your favorite designs.
Procreate
Procreate is a well-known illustration app made exclusively for digital artists, painters, or even beginners. For users to feel as authentic as possible, the app comes with many brushes – pencils, charcoal, inks, aesthetic brushes. You name it, Procreate got it.
Procreate can record automatically and save your drawing process – such a plus point compared to other platforms, right? From saved time-lapses, you can have much more time to polish up your tattoo.
Photoshop
When it comes to sophisticated details, no other apps handle them better than Photoshop. While you work on your tattoo with Photoshop, you can do pretty much anything from retouching, compositing to layering it.
Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop
Based on our experience, integrating AI and Photoshop will be the best combo ever to help you sketch a new tattoo design. Photoshop will provide you tools to edit and modify the patterns on the photo, while AI is the application for sketching new icons.
What makes them so adorable is that Photoshop and AI come from the same designer – Adobe. Thus, you can copy and paste ALL the items from one file to another WITHOUT any format changes. Just open two apps at the same time, then draw on AI, edit on Photoshop, and pick one item from another interchangeably with no worry that the resolution can be changed. Amazing!
Test How It Looks On Your Skin
One of the most common mistakes people make when getting a tattoo is that they don’t test how it looks first. It’s your body; you must treat it as a temple. To see how your design looks in certain positions on your body, we recommend you use Kapwing.
First, take a photo of your arm, leg, or anywhere you want to get the tattoo. After that, upload your photo to the app’s Studio section. Import your ink design, rotate, and resize until you’re satisfied with it.
A more practical way to see how the design looks on your skin is to make a temporary tattoo. It will be much easier to find one suitable spot for the tattoo on your body by printing it out. There are trustworthy websites such as Inkbox, Tattly, TemporaryTattoos, etc. – be free to pick out the one that most suits your style.
Tips For Designing A Tattoo On A Computer
Getting a tattoo means that you’ll have to live with your decision for the rest of your life. So, make sure you create the best version of your tattoo artwork by our handy tips below:
- Keep it simple: Although delicate details make your tattoo more appealing, you shouldn’t put them in one small-scale space too much. If your design is a mini tattoo, keep it as simple as possible.
- Respect tattoo heritage: Modern tattoo styles are getting more and more popular among the young. But have you ever wondered, “In five years’ time, will people be bored with their ‘trending’ tattoos?”? Perhaps it will, perhaps it won’t. But trust us, tattoos will look better when you mix up classic and modern features.
- Be bold: Your tattoo is permanent, so it must have some meaning, right? If you think adding one small feature is going to make your design remarkable, go for it. You only live once, so why hesitate?
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Where Can I Design a Tattoo Online?
You may wonder where you should design your tattoo online? No worries! We are here to alleviate your concerns and help you choose certain applications and online sites – where you can make the design of your long-awaited tattoo.
We have picked out the best online sites to design tattoos:
Free Tattoo Creator: It has a wide variety of designs available to you. In the same way, you can create your own design and combine them with those available if that is your preference.
FontSpace: With this website, you can download any legally licensed fonts for your tattoo designs. Do you know that with just a small modification in your design, the whole impression can be changed? Just try downloading one font from the site and apply it to your design, and you will see how the vibe changed!
Canva: For any university students, especially those in the Marketing and PR field, Canva must be the most popular site. You can use more than 1000 templates, varying from business presentation slides, portfolio design to individual art projects to modify and save as your own product.
Especially, you can download the files in PNG – the highest quality picture format – for further use. Especially, all these features are for free!
Conclusion
Getting a tattoo makes you unique and stand out from others. But above all, designing a tattoo by yourself is like creating your own masterpiece. Hopefully, our article on how to design a tattoo on a computer brings helpful information to you. For more updates in the future, don’t forget to stay tuned!
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