New School tattoos have gained great acceptance in recent years and have established themselves as one of the most popular styles among those who choose to get a tattoo.
New School tattoos are characterized by their use of bright, vibrant colors , a wide variety of shades, and a strong emphasis on gradients, along with the fundamental use of shading. The use of multiple tones of each color is extremely important, achieving the graphic effect that so defines this style and clearly reflects its influence from comics and graffiti.
Furthermore, in these tattoos, the well-defined and delimited black lines take center stage. This is not the case with similar styles such as " full color ".
The rise of new school tattoos goes hand in hand with technological advancements. All the latest developments and new knowledge in the tattooing field are being fully utilized .
The improvements in new tattoo machines, and the pigments in the inks, which are much more durable and brighter, have made it possible to achieve new and more convincing gradients, smaller details, and colors that would previously have been unthinkable to use in a tattoo.
It's worth noting that perspective is another key characteristic of new school tattoos. Especially when multiple elements are used in a design, artists often play with daring perspectives. This results in an effect similar to three-dimensional tattoos, achieving a certain distortion of forms without losing the overall concept. Again, this is something very common and typical in urban graffiti.
Due to its characteristics, the New School style can adapt to any idea and offers a wide range of possibilities for creating a great tattoo. The only limitations you'll face are the tattoo artist's skill and your ability to come up with an amazing design.
The successor line to the Old School
Both born in the United States, we could think of the New School style as a kind of wayward child of the Old School or traditional style.
To finish understanding the differences between one and the other, we are going to define some concepts that characterize both styles.
The Old School style, also called traditional, is characterized, like its successor, by the use of well-defined black lines. But When it comes to adding color, this is where the biggest differences begin to be seen..
The Old School style has a very limited color palette and a complete absence of color blending. The colors used are greens, reds, blues, and a few other options, but without any shading. The idea behind an Old School tattoo is to achieve a simple design with few lines, solid colors, no blending, and as mentioned, no shading.
The most common designs in Old School tattoos are anchors, seagulls, hearts, and felines, and it is here, in the designs themselves, that the two styles cross paths again. New School tattoos, although with a much broader scope (since they include cartoons, comics, graffiti, manga , etc.), share these designs, but unlike their predecessor, they delve deeply into gradients, shading, and color blending.
The tattoos have a lot of movement, a bright and electric finish , with exaggerated dimensions, sometimes similar to 3D, sometimes closer to realism, with changes in tones, with passages from light to dark.
the missing link
We couldn't finish this article without talking about the middle ground between New School and traditional tattooing.
Closer to the Old School style, it emerges as a revision of that style and achieves amazing designs. We're talking about the Neo-Traditional style.
As we've noted, neo-traditional tattoos are a modern take on Old School. They remain quite faithful to their predecessor in terms of colors and bold lines , but add greater depth through shading and other colors, including white.
Because it falls between two styles, it leads to confusion and is sometimes mislabeled as New School. To understand it a little better, we could say that the Neo-traditional style uses fewer colors than New School, but more than Old School.
It doesn't have exaggerated proportions, and it moves away from the cartoonish or graffiti style that characterizes New School. While gradients are very present, as in New School, the designs or motifs are a bit more classic. The contrasts are softer, and it keeps the colors within a relatively limited palette.
To conclude, then, we could establish the following list to correctly determine the essential characteristics of each of these styles.
New School:
Lines: Abundant, varied in thickness, black and colored.
Designs: Complex, cartoonish and graffiti-influenced, distorted perspectives
Colors: Multiplicity of colors, electric, mix and gradient
oldschool:
Lines: Black, thick and well defined
Designs: Simple, classic.
Colors: Few, without mixing or gradation
Neo-Traditional:
Lines: Black
Designs: Detailed and multidimensional, revised classics.
Colors: Classic palette, with shading and gradient
