New School Tattoos
New School tattoos are characterized by the use of heavy outlines, intense colors, and exaggerated proportions of the subject. It’s a highly animated style of tattooing, using colorful cartoony characters realistically shaded, and it is often called “cartoonish.” Colors tend to be brighter and more saturated than Traditional or Neotraditional work.
The term New School is sometimes used interchangeably with Neotraditional, but there are key differences. From a technical point of view, they both do share the use of varying line widths, more dimension, and a more diverse color palette than Traditional tattoos. Aesthetically, however, New School dramatizes the subject matter, akin to caricature, rather than offering a more straightforward representation.
As a movement, it shares more ties to street art culture than Traditional military tattoo culture, representing a transition towards openness in the sharing of techniques in tattooing.
Originally published at www.tattoofilter.com.
