Tattoo Training School

Sometimes people who have never undergone a professional portfolio review have questions about what to expect. While many artists with formal training are familiar with portfolio reviews, it may still be a cause for nervousness. For this reason we offer helpful tips for those wishing to prepare a portfolio for review.

Do: Present your work professionally. This means presenting artwork in a protective portfolio, neatly organized, with each piece of art labeled in the backside's upper right corner with the contact details of the student. 

Don't: Hand us a random collection of ragged notebook paper sketches cobbled together from your time in study hall. Your work could easily become lost, damaged or disappear accidentally. In any case, it is certainly unlikely to be taken seriously.

Do: Present the widest possible range of your talent in every media you have skill in (graphite, pen & ink, acrylics, watercoloring, etc.). Show a range of illustration styles such as photo-realism, cartoons, lettering and examples of various types of texture rendering (flesh, metal, fur, scales, etc.). Look at magazines and see what types of tattoos are popular and try to draw a few things that you think would make good tattoos.

Don't: Present only one type of artwork. While you might be a whiz at lettering or tribal your potential career does not include such narrow focus on a single type of art. Everyone starts as a generalist and being a one-trick pony is not valuable or desireable to the beginner.

Do: Include a minimum of 20 pieces of art. You're an artist right? So show us the goods!

Don't: Turn in an anorexic portfolio. No matter how good your one or two drawings might be, it speaks of a passing interest rather than a lifetime commitment.

Don't: Expect to whisk your artwork away immediately. We want to study your talent, not try and pull details about something we might have seen from our fuzzy aging memories.

Do: Try to focus your portfolio choices on art that could be translated to tattooing.

Don't: Worry yourself with including amateur tattoos. We assume you want to come to school to learn to tattoo rather than show us you've been illegally tattooing.