A few of us are followers of dip-n-rip tattoos with little or no planning. Who cares? It’s not like tattoos are everlasting, proper? Others desire a barely extra measured strategy. Should you’ve ever gotten a fragile, detailed tattoo, you might have been stunned by how lengthy it takes your tattoo artist to go from doodle to having the tough define of your soon-to-be physique artwork transferred onto your pores and skin. Ghostline just lately launched an iPad app to try to change all of that, dragging (some) tattoo artists into the digital age.
“All the pieces within the tattoo trade is type of antiquated at this level,” mentioned London Reese, founder at Ghostline, in an interview with TechCrunch. “Machines and instruments have gotten higher, however tech hasn’t actually entered the house apart from batteries and possibly digital artwork codecs. We’ve been spending the identical period of time for years, and it grew to become evident to me that there needed to be a method that I may optimize the method of constructing a stencil, particularly for artists who create real looking art work.
“Now we have iPads, we’ve software program, we’ve all these drawing instruments, however nothing would flip that imagery right into a stencil that I may print out and apply to pores and skin. That takes anyplace from 30 to 90 minutes each day. That has at all times been a part of the method, however I puzzled and mentioned, ‘Wait! I believe I may make one thing like that!’”
To Reese, the worth is saving time. Spending six or seven hours per week on creating stencils may as an alternative be spent tattooing extra prospects, and he laments both lacking out on cash or on time together with his household.
The a part of the method the app replaces is stenciling. Historically, you’d must hand-design and hint a stencil on high of a photograph, after which run it by way of a Thermofax or some form of thermal copier. From there, you’ll be able to apply that carbon stencil onto pores and skin. The app replaces the necessity to hand-trace. As well as, it affords just a few further options that make it simpler to resize work throughout a number of sheets of stencil paper or to do tattoo work in a number of classes.
“We developed a method to make the app AirPrint suitable, so we will print straight from the app straight to a contemporary inkjet printer. As an alternative of utilizing printer ink, the printer may have tattoo stencil ink and runs stencil paper as an alternative of printer paper,” Reese explains. “You print it out, minimize it out, apply it to the physique and it’s able to go.”
Ghostline produced a little bit video displaying off the way it all works, that includes Reese himself:
The app additionally has instruments in-built that make it potential to scale pictures and print them over a number of sheets in a grid. By automating that course of, it turns into repeatable, which suggests you may get precise measurements after which put it aside on the pill. You possibly can come again to it one other day — weeks or months later — and reapply it, aligned with the tattooing that’s already accomplished, to proceed the tattoo.
The corporate at the moment has round 3,000 customers, rising at round 100 per day. It’s free to strive for per week; after that, it prices $5.99 monthly or $59.99 per yr for limitless use.
Nevertheless, Reese admits the app is probably not for everybody.
“You recognize, there’s a cool old-school mentality in tattooing that I hope by no means dies. You be taught the way in which of the forefathers of tattooing and also you do it that method and also you don’t deliver anything into it, as a result of it really works,” Reese laughs. “I like that. Nevertheless, I’m a contemporary man in trendy tradition. If I can discover one thing that can enable me to optimize my workflow, I’m all about it. I’ve been making an attempt to optimize my workstation and my workflow for years, and this is only one little ingredient of it. I don’t thoughts that some guys aren’t gonna prefer it or are gonna suppose it’s not for them. That’s high quality. That’s tattooing. That’s artwork. Proper? All of us have a course of.”
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