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Hey bro,

All mediums will help add to your tattooing skills. If I had to choose 3, I would say, Painting, Drawing, and sculpting. next I would highly recommend digital art, photography, and air brushing. If you could dab a little into any of these mediums, It will really help to improve the way you approach Tattooing.

Hope that helps, Take care.


Stephen Stacey

eaxctly. I'll add this:

grab a filbert brush, some different sizes
a couple flat brushes.
may be a round but don;t bother too much with them.

line oriented tattoos like traditional, manga/new school, and pinups will be drawing drills.

Stuff like mike does is more painting. by that i mean direct opacity, so oils or acrylics. not water color.

layering is best understood from airbrushing and custom paint. a lot of tattoo layering is difficult and this is the big debate about tattoos holding up over time. When in doubt saturate. so heavy body acrylics are cheaper and safer start to understanding this style of art, and it can be used anywhere there is a substrate to take the paint.
A good "wakeup call" is to get a piece of wood, apply 1/8th inch jont compount to it and start painting wet right away. Do this and you have the sisteen chapel. and some theories in tattooing layers and color fades in living skin will make a little more sense.
good luck and have fun with it

sorry, let me also add that i am coming directly from extensive airbrushing and custom paint and recently (since tattooing) picked up a traditional paintbrush.
best answer is that unfortunately there is no best practice, i mean to say that NOTHING is like tattooing in any way. You'll already need to have been tattooing to compare the difference.
cold steel makes poly propelyne swords that my students love, but they arnt balanced and they don;t cut through the air.

I'm sure you've been in pig skin and rubber with your tattoo machine and know there is no similarity.

However, brush painting did help me understand mags a lot more. by that time a lot of other unknown techiques started to be self explanitory. and i was doing painterly and realism the very next tattoo and nailing it. We all learn different ways at different speeds. But I advise every tattoo artist to dabble in multiple forms of art and try to master a couple.