Help with tattoo drawing

[Poltox]

Hi everyone!

I am planing to get a tattoo, the image i want to base my tattoo on is Derek Hess "Flood Damage".

The thing is that i do not want the lines witch goes vertical in the image, the birds, and the black spot on his chest. And also get it in black and white.

How do i start? I have a time trial version of photoshop v11. How do I modify the image to get higher resulotion and quality? Is it just to start drawing "by hand" with the brush tool?

Thanks in advance!

King regards Simon

[TommyO]

Simon,
I don't have any knowledge of the tat industry, so I'll wait to see what the others say. But, my thought would be... aren't the tatoo artists generally very good artists ? I would think all you would need to do is take that image in there and tell them what you told us. I think they like to sketch it up, have you critique and approve, then they trace it on you and start. Again, I only know what I've seen on the tube.... looking forward to a real answer.

[ScottR]

I agree with TommyO, the tatoo artist should be able to do the redraw of the image that you want. For me it is easier to do the work than try to explain to you how to do it yourself so, here you are.

[Poltox]

Hi!

Yes, the tattoo artist is often a very good artist. The thing is that i want to have a start on my computer, so that I can draw it on paper later on. And I also want to play with ideas on my computer. Another thing is that I want to start learning a bit of photoediting. So I thougt that it would be a good idea to start with a project witch I will se the real result of.

So far i have tryed to do some threshold with the image, but with bad results.

[ScottR]

Crop the part of the image that you want to keep.
Use the rectangle marquee tool to select the water as close to the man as possible, you don't have to select it all just the clean part. Press Ctrl+T, this makes the selection into free transform, drag the end of the transform box out to stretch the water out beyond the vertical lines, do this for both sides. You can use the rectangle marquee tool to select parts of the vertical line that you don't want and fill with white. The other areas that need to be cleaned up is best to use a layer mask and the brush tool. The black spot on the chest I did by using the rectangle marquee tool to make a selection of the left side of the chest and making a new layer via copy. I selected the copy and applied the free transform tool and flipped horizontal and moved it to the right side. Using the transform warp tool I stretched it into place. I then erased parts that I didn't want and used the smudge tool to blend it into the image. I used the smudge tool to smooth out the vertical lines in the arms. You can convert the image into grayscale or use adjustments Black and White.

This should get you going but learning Photoshop will take some time, by the way I use a Wacom tablet which makes using the brush tool easier to use over a mouse or track ball.

Good Luck!