Thursday, July 4, 2013

Retro tattoos: Old-school style

 Hello everyone! Today I want to talk with you about retro tattoo slyle. It is very interesting to see how this retro old-school style was created and  what were the main features of retro tattoos. So, let`s begin!

"Traditional", or "Old-school" style is a traditionally american tattoo-style. It was created in the post-war period and was extremely popular. The main thing was to have such tattoo, and its creativity wasn`t a big deal. That is why some motives and elements are quite simmilar.



The main feature of this style was the usage of very thick black outlines and red, green colours. A little bit of blue, yellow and lilac colours were also used. 


The second thing to mention is that such tattoos were more like an illustration (they tended to be like a cartoon picture) with no shadows or volume. Why? It helped make the process of creating of the tattoo much quicker, just because sailors hadn`t got enough time to stay in one place.


The founder of this style was Sailor Jerry (Norman Collins was his name) who opened his tattoo-shop and began to spread this style around the country.


So, the founder was a sailor, and there was even a tradition for sailors to make a new tattoo in every new place they visited. 


Sailor Jerry became a real symbol of that period of history, he has made thousands of tattoos. The main feature of his style was the combination of bright polychromic colours like in japanese tattoo-tradition(he was influenced by it) and quite rough line style.


The most popular images were, of course, mermaids, sharps, roses, anchors, swallows, daggers. But the main elements of the tattoo were roses, hearts with ribbons and rolls. 
Pin-up tattoos were also popular, with the images og different girls, cherries, Harley Davidson`s  bikes etc.
.



No comments:

Post a Comment