Untattooed skin reflects light differently from tattooed skin.  If you mix a color exactly the same as your natural flesh tone and tattoo it into your skin, that area will have less luminosity than the untouched skin around it.  Why?  All those pigment particles absorb light, while untattooed skin reflects back most of the light hitting it.  This makes it that much more important to use negative space effectively, to separate and clarify the major elements of the design.

In Salvador Dali’s painting Atomic Leta (I’d show you, but I don’t have the legal rights- if you don’t already own a Dali book, you need one!  In the meantime, you should be able to find this in a Google image search) is a masterful example of a dynamic pos/neg relationship.  In the foreground is a nude figure floating in space lit with a strong, bright light source, giving her some warmly lit areas and some areas of dark shadow.  Behind the figure is a blue lagoon rendered in mostly simple, flat tones as not to compete with the foreground.  As this blue field gets closer to the brightly lit parts of the figure it gets darker; by the time it vanishes behind the figure it’s about twice as dark as the surrounding ambient blue.  Similarly, the blue areas that disappear behind the heavily shaded parts of the figure fade to a lighter blue, strengthening these areas’ pos-on-neg relationship.  The resulting appearance is not only clearer and easier to read, but gives the figure a kind of surreal optical shimmer that really adds to the painting’s effect.

In reality, we actually see things this way, to a certain extent.  If you hold your hand up against the daytime sky and look at its silhouette, you may notice a thin corona of color around it that’s a shade lighter than the rest of the sky.  This is a by-product of our seeing process and how the brain interprets strongly contrasting images.

Naturally, these ideas about pos/neg relationships need to be interpreted loosely, or it could be easy to get bogged down in formula and dogma.  It’s critical that we let our rules and guidelines hum quietly in the background while our creative processes are allowed to explore the different possibilities unrestricted.

However, if you are working on a design and are wanting to give it a greater sense of impact, narrow your mental focus for a moment and consider the pos/neg relationships in the design.  Most readability and clarity issues can be resolved this way.  If you make a good habit of consciously considering these relationships throughout the drawing process, you’ll find that eventually you’ll be able to naturally draw more readable designs with less and less deliberate thought.  Out of all the different factors that can be adjusted in a composition, its positive/negative relationships will have the greatest impact on whether or not it reads clearly from a distance or through the passage of time.

Sometimes it will take a little experimentation to find the optimal combination of pos/neg relationships in a design; that’s why it’s so important to do a shaded value study before doing the tattoo, where you won’t have a second chance.  Because this can take some trial and error, I recommend using graphite or some other erasable medium.  More importantly, I suggest that you do your value studies small; you can work more quickly, try more options, and get a better overall sense of the piece that way without committing yourself to a larger shaded drawing that might not be going in the best possible direction.

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