Hi, this is Ryan with Better Tattooing. Today we're going to be talking about doing tattoos and creating a softer hard edge and a couple techniques on how to actually do it. Anyways, let's go. Ha-ha-ha! ["The Last of Us") Alright, now that's over with and it's something I'ma teeth. Software hard edges. A lot of people will talk about this when they get into realism, but realistically, anything that we get into art wise is going to have a soft or a hard edge. So when we start defining our designs when we're going, I'm really weird because I do like my actual art before the tattoo. I'm thinking about how I'm going to be putting it in all the time. I'm not just trying to create a design and hope that it fits. I'm thinking about where it's going to be on the body, how light's going to interact with it, where people are going to see it and the, you know, environment that it's going to exist in and how it's going to age. So when we're thinking about, when we're thinking about specifically softer hard edges, when we're thinking about is where things are going to determine it. Hard edges like a line, where there's a distinct separation between two areas. Now this can denote depth or it can even be just a change in value. This can be like high, it's more forward and this is low underneath, vice versa, or whatever else. Hard edge is always going to define just a distinct separation between things, right? Now a soft edge is something that might be a little bit less defined. We're going to do something like this. Right, this can be a space like if we have a variation inside of a leaf or some type of venous work that we're going to be working off of, where we can see that there is a dramatic change in the topography that's there, but it's not enough to denote actually describing and defining a separate layer for that thing that we're doing, right? So when we're doing tattooing and we have two of these things next to each other, this can be considered an outline and maybe like a shade breaker, a line inside that we're going to use gray line to define what's going to happen off of it. We need to know like when to apply these and when not to or even how to do them. And so the first explanation is done. If you have something that you need to terminate that needs its own distinct space, hard, soft is going to blur those edges, right? If we're going to like portraiture, this may be edge of hair, maybe even that crown on the ear, nostril, part of the iris, something like that, right? All the softer lines may be like the edges of the nose, things that are going to change in depth, the presumption of depth inside of the piece, but they're not going to actually require something so solid that's, you know, it's going to make it look out because I'll I'll make it look unnatural. So how do we do these? Hard edges are done with liners. Done? That's easy. Really simple. I mean, you can also do it with a a mag, but usually what's going to happen is whatever type of fill that you're going to have there is going to be solid, saturated, and it usually is going to be cleaned up or touched up with a liner at the end to increase definition. And when you do this, usually you're going to have the liner pointing into wherever this edge is. So like if I have a high and a low spot and I'm defining the high spot with this line, I will run my liner cutting back in towards the thing that it's supposed to be defining rather than pointing it away because as it ages, the pigment is going to move in the way that that trauma is being applied, right? So we don't want to have it blow out down over time as the skin ages, 5, 10 years out. So if we want to keep a crisp, we're going to undercut and bring it up like that. Really simple. Use a liner. You can use color, you can use black, you can use white, whatever, but make sure that you're going to keep that thing nice and tight and well defined. That is a hard edge. Woop! A soft edges can get tricky. Normally, when we're applying them, we can use liners, but normally these are either going to have to be wash lines if it's with a liner, right? Or they're going to have to be scu-plines. Woop! Scu-pline. I'm just going to scu-pline in general. So wash. Scu-pline if we're going to be using a mag or a liner. What do I mean by scu-pline? It's a process of basically just like flick shading, going back over and around, right? So we have our needle outside of the skin coming back in, coming back in and whipping out. And all you're doing is just not defining that edge where these needles are actually coming in, and since they're hitting randomly around the edges, it's going to look much, much more organic and natural when it actually peels and settles. It's not going to be dead straight. There's going to be small variations. And that's realistically what a soft edge is. It's not so well defined. It's kind of more scattered. So scu-pline with a curved mag. Flat sometimes can end up leaping gradient lines, coming off of them if you don't know how to do it quite well. So if you're just learning, sticking with rounded mags works great. Another thing you can use, and this is what they were originally designed for, is round shaders. Round shaders, you can literally just go in and try to run a line, and it'll automatically break it apart, make it soft. It's not a solid filled line. It's not really well concentrated stuff, right? You're going to get something that, as it heals, it's going to spread bleed and soften out. I always depend on the tone that you're using and whatever volume of the pigment that's in there that's not washed out. That's the easiest way to do this stuff. You're lining in something that needs to have a soft edge, use a round shader, and do it the same speed. You're not trying to full saturate. You're just trying to get the line in there so that it looks like it's shaded. Easy peasy. Two very simple techniques. Look at your artwork, see what needs harder soft. To find it like that, you're good to go. That's it for today. It's Ram, Petri Tetsuo, and sign it off.