HGG Community Forums

What kind of device are you using? I've never had any problems, but I use a PC and a fair sized monitor. Some players have reported that it can be difficult to do some things on a phone.

I've found it easiest when making tattoos to work pixel by pixel rather than trying to draw lines. A mouse isn't the best drawing tool ever created. *G* Someday, when I find the gold at the rainbow's end, I will invest in a Wacom tablet.

So, this is how I go about it. Forgive me if I start with things you already know.

1. I go to the Tattoo Registry under Stable Management and buy a new tattoo slot. You're probably on your first free tattoo, but I'm not.

2. I try to have some idea of what I want the tattoo to look like, then select a color by clicking on the small black square under the lower right corner of the drawing box.

The color picker opens with Red selected, and a square that shows a range of shades with the lightest in the extreme top left corner, and varying the intensity of the red as you move to the right and the darkness as you move down.

There is a small square at the top center of the color picker that shows what color is currently selected. When you select a new color, this square shows you the old color and the new one, so you can compare them. This is especially helpful when you want to adjust the shade or intensity by a small amount.

If you want to choose another base color there are several ways to do this.

a. There is a rainbow to the right of this box. You can select a basic shade by clicking somewhere along that vertical stripe of color and then find the exact shade from the options in the square.

b. Moving to the right, you will next see boxes that will display numerical values for various attributes of the chosen color, including hue, saturation, the amount of red, green, and blue. The variable labeled A allows you to give the chosen color various percentages of transparency. At bottom of this column is where you can enter the hex code for a color. I'm not sure what the very bottom variable, which at the moment displays "ff" controls.

If you click up and down the rainbow bar, you can watch these values change. I don't often do a lot with this feature, unless I am making a design in Photoshop to transfer to the editor. There I can find out the numerical values of a shade I like and insert them into the HaJ tattoo editor.

c. At the very right, is a selection of colors, which you can use as a starting point for selecting a color.

When you have chosen a color to work with, click on OK. If you decide not to change the color after all this, click Cancel.

3. With a color selected, I place the cursor in the drawing box where I want to start drawing and click the left mouse button. This puts one pixel of color in the field.

To the right of the drawing box, are your tools. You can select Brush to add a spot of color, Eraser to remove color, or the dropper to copy a color used somewhere in your drawing so that you can use that color elsewhere. When Brush or Eraser are selected, you can increase the size to add or subtract larger amounts of color with one click.

4. Below the drawing box and tool selector you will see a tiny, tiny life size reproduction of what you have drawn. If you are changing a saved tattoo image you will see the original (or last saved version) and the current state of your drawing. I believe that this is the exact size of the tattoo. The drawing box greatly magnifies the pixels so you can see what you are doing. Save your work frequently, because if you work too long without saving, you can lose your progress.


I'm sure there's a lot I haven't mentioned, but this covers some of the basics. If you continue to have trouble, you can have another player create a tattoo to your specifications and sell it to you. I have done this for quite a few people.