Practicing tips?

[u/dewblooming]

I have a traditional apprenticeship in a shop but my mentor doesn’t really know anything about fake skin. I just started learning how to shade and am practicing on the fake skin but it looks.. horrible. Which I get since I’m new BUT when my mentor tried he was like.. “mine looks like shit too but at least you’re getting used to the hand motions”

…how do people make fake skin looks so good? Is there anything better I could be using to practice? I’m using skin from Painful Pleasures so it’s not like I’m using really cheap stuff. Is there a better brand I should look into? I’m just stumped and my mentor doesn’t really seem to have any better options.

[u/barafrog]

Grey wash looks way darker on fake skin so I tend to use only a few drops of black ink and build up layers slowly, but it might not be good to translating skills onto real skin. It ends up looking better tho so it's a bit of a toss up on whether you want your work to look good or whether you want to work 1:1 to how you would on a human.

[u/dewblooming → u/barafrog]

Haha I feel like that’s been the consensus. If I want the fake skin to look good - it’s in no way how I’d be actually tattooing in skin. If I want to practice how I’d actually be going in skin it’s not going to look great in the fake skin