8/10/12

Aaaaaarruughgh!  That's how I feel lately about my tattoos.   I'm so frusterated about how they come out, for the most part.  I don't know what's going wrong.  I know there's a couple of things I can do well. I can pull a nice line, with a tight 7, especially if it's one of my own designs.  I have a hard time with smaller lining needles.  And I have an especially hard time when I'm doing something I didn't draw.  I wish I could just tattoo my drawings and ideas on people everyday.  Large (like the size of a sheet of paper) tattoos, done in 3 sessions turn out the best for me I think.  I like to do the lines and some black shading in one session, then all the color in a second session, and finally a touch-up and high light session to really clean/tighten everything up.

I'm going to be starting school again in a couple of weeks.  I took 4 classes this semester; photography, motion graphics, computer as an artistic medium, and an advanced oil painting class.  I'm pretty nervous about being overwhelmed because I'm working and we're going to be home schooling our kids starting this year (because I don't believe in our system, but that discussion is for another time).  I'm going to be a busy boy.  My little fantasy was to have enough clientele built up to be able to work by appointement and make the same money while spending less hours sitting around the shop.  But with the crap tats I've been turning out it's no wonder that isn't happening.  I just keep working on it and trying to become the best I can be.  A couple of the classes I'm taking are on-line classes so I can be at school and work at the same time.


Alright, enough babbling, I'm sure no one reads that crap anyway, here's what you came for...pics.

Here's a Tiki/witch doctor thing I started on a kid the other day.  He's holding a "ball of light".  I outlined it with teal ink, it's going to throw a greenish secondary light on the character.  I outlined most of this with a 5 and re-lined the thicker parts with a loose 8.  I'm pretty happy with this one, he'll be back next week to color it.  This kid sits like a rock.  This was his first tattoo and you can see it's pretty huge.

Some writing, whatever.  I don't really like the "R".  I wish my lettering was more interesting to look at.  I plan on spending some money on a couple of lettering guides soon, but I still haven't read all the stuff I bought last month.

I added these wings to this guy's cross.  The right wing looks a little dark in the pics.  It didn't seem like that  in "real life".

Before

After

 

 

There's some dark purple in the middle of the butterfly covering the heart.  I'm sure she'll need a second session because I could see the other design through mine before she even left.  Sometimes the back of the neck can be really hard to tattoo because the skin is so tough, it's hard to get it to take ink.  This was an extremely hard neck to tattoo.  I've found that if you just slow down and let the machine do it's thing it will eventually pound the ink in.  You gotta be patient or you'll end up with a tattoo that's even crappier than this one.

Some guy came in and asked me to combine the names "Izabella, Victor, and Danika" in a tribal design.  This is what it looks like.  That's so hard, I hate doing this kind of crap because even if you're able to complete the challenge you're not going to have a nice looking design.  I think if you want a name tattoo, get a name tattoo.  Plain and simple. Clean and legible.  But I did the best I could

I added color to this pot leaf cover up.  I like doing this kind of stuff!