The Smoothing setting makes it easy to hand-draw your designs with neat flowing lines. The use of a Pen tablet will make illustrating the design much more natural, but it is possible to draw using a mouse.
Under the Brush Settings, reduce the Spacing to 1%, then check the Smoothing option. Set up the Brush tool with an appropriately sized tip for the width of the linework (20px in my case), with the hardness value to 100%. I’m working with a canvas size of around 2000x2000px. Open Adobe Photoshop and create a new document. The design I will be creating in this tutorial uses simplistic shapes, a limited colour palette and grainy shading that mimics the style of old tattoo flash graphics. Hearts and roses that are accompanied with a banner containing the name of a loved one is an iconic design often associated with sailors.
There are many symbols that are associated with traditional tattoos. Unlike tattooing with ink, Photoshop layers to make it easy to draw with the advantage of being able to delete and try again! We’ll then bring the design to life with colour, and apply a stippled shading effect to create a modern interpretation of a traditional tattoo flash graphic. Follow along with today’s Photoshop tutorial to produce a digital illustration inspired by the style of old school tattoos. The stylised handmade drawings feature thick black outlines and bold colours, often depicting roses, anchors and pin-up girls from the tradition of sailor tattooing. The style of ‘Old School’ tattoos is a popular aesthetic in the tattooing scene and has become an iconic illustration style in other genres of art.