You will know a new school tattoo when you see one. New school tattoos calls for big, bright, bold, solid color with heavy black outlines to push things forward. New school tattoo designs are known to be warped, and you have this very cartoonish, well colored, and very rendered design that is every graphic artist’s dream.
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What is New School Tattooing?
As per Wikipedia, New school is a tattooing style originating as early as the 1970s and influenced by some features of old school tattooing in the United States. You will see uses of heavy outlines, vivid colors, and exaggerated depictions of the subject in new school tattoos. New school tattoos represent a transition towards openness in the sharing of techniques in tattooing.
History of New School Tattooing
New school tattoos look nothing like traditional tattoos, but it follows some basic techniques of traditional style. Like neo-traditional and traditional tattoos, new school tattoos use bold black lines to keep the colors separated, and they also use large shapes and designs that create legible tattoos. In the 90s, tattoo artists were experimenting with the tattoo designs that incorporated celebrities, science fiction, anime, and manga characters. Various pop cultures influenced new school tattooing a lot, and it became one of the biggest tattoo trends. Since then, the style has evolved so much as people are accepting and experimenting with more and more new designs and ideas these days. New school tattoos are all about self-expression and celebration of art. Tattoo artists are also continuously pushing their boundaries with new school tattoos because it gives them ultimate freedom when it comes to choosing subjects, techniques, and colors.
Styles of New School Tattoos
When it comes to new school tattoo designs, childhood nostalgia and fantasies play a big part. That is why comic book heroes, anime, or sci-fi fantasy characters are perhaps the most common concepts within this style. Any particular tattoo style does not restrict new school tattoos, so you get whatever you want and the way you want. New school tattoos are very popular among the gamers, comic and graphic novel lovers, as well as the anime lovers.
Besides animations, graffiti has a lot of influence on New school tattooing. Graffiti was always popular in the underground, but it became mainstream in the 90s. Like graffiti, the new school tattoos are vibrant and colorful. New School tattoo artists used bright colors, drop shadows, and graceful lines of street artists as inspiration for their designs. You will notice that graffiti fonts are ubiquitous in new school tattoo designs.
New School Tattoos vs Old School Tattoos
New school tattoos do not follow all the traditional guidelines of tattooing. People often confuse them with neo-Traditional tattoos as they also use bright colors and 3D shadings. neo-Traditional tattoos are a modern representation of old school traditional tattoos. Even they are grown from the same roots but still not different.
Difference between New school tattoos and Old school tattoos are:
- In subject matter, there are no restrictions in new school tattooing where old school tattoos only use limited subjects like anchors, swallows, knife, etc.
- New school tattooing is more freestyle and does not follow any defined style, but old school tattooing has its own style and strict rules.
- Its all about color for new school tattoos, but old school tattoos use a limited color palette.
- Most new school tattoos use 3D shadings, where old school tattoos have 2D.
The popularity of new School tattooing has grown considerably in recent years with the appearance of talented artists. They continuously surprise us with their creativity and unique designs. The below collection of the New School Tattoos presents an enormous artistic diversity, spanning genres related to this relatively new style of tattooing, such as Graffiti, Comic, Cartoons, Anime, and Pop Culture. Depending on the artists, you will see the diverse techniques they have used to create these tattoos, as well as their distinctive personal touch on each of them.
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