7/22/12

I have a lot to write about.  It's been a few days.  I've been thinking a lot about the blog and want to write a couple of posts about my drawing technique and my theories about art in general.  But first I'm gonna talk about a few tattoos I've done lately.

This is a lioness I tattooed on my wife.  It took 4 hours and I'm pretty proud of it.  Some of the things I liked are the eyes, and nose.  I think they came out pretty good.  I like the transition of the colors in the sky.  I'll use those again for sure.  It's Eternal's smoke and mint green.  I had a hard time getting some of the colors I had planned on using to show up because she's got some pretty brown skin.  I learned that yellow doesn't show up on brown very well.  I'd like to do another session when it heals.  I think I could improve the looks of the snout.  Also in the places where I packed in white it started seeping that night.

You can see the white ink seeping out, especially under the eye.

Now it has been a few days (6) and it's almost completely healed already except there are scabs on the white and the skin is dry and flaky.   Here's my theory on they white, I (like most) tend to pack in the white extra hard because it doesn't always show up when it heals.  I think that the extra trauma to the skin actually allows for the ink to reject easier, countering the effect.  This is something I'll have to play around with in the future.  Please comment if you have thoughts on it.  She felt that it was a relatively low pain tattoo.  I'll post pics when it's completely healed.

Click to enalrge

 This is a Bluebird brand recording studio mic. Overall I really like it and the customer loves it, plus I had a lot of fun doing it.  I tried to draw it in a way that it looked like something was going on, like there is action, not just a stagnant object.
  There's some music notes in the background which I wanted to just do a subtle gray shade on, but I was using too hard hitting of a machine so I couldn't do what I wanted.  I told him to come back when it's healed and let me clean it up a bit.  I liked the way the blues came out on the handle and the over all composition was good.  It was hard to work it in with the other random designs he had on his arm already.  I think it would have been a better tattoo if I could have gotten some of the lines more perfect.  I want to get an ellipse stencil plate for drawing things lie this.  If the transfer would have been, like engineer perfect, the tattoo would be better.  Aim small miss small.  I wish I had the patience and skills to render my line-work in illustrator.  I really should try doing a few tattoos that way and see how they come out.

There's no hard lines on the feathers inside the wings.  I was planning on doing this much larger, the customer originally wanted this to fill his whole upper arm but decided to reduce it to 80% when he arrived.  I wish he wouldn't have done that cause I had a lot more cool detail planned for it.  I think I need to order more browns.  I also realized after looking at pics that his right (the eagle's left) wing is a lot darker than the other one.  But the actual light is coming from the left so it might not be like that on the real tattoo.

I'm wearing this, I didn't tattoo it.

I got this Banksy design done on my inner arm.  Alex from Rochester Tattoo did it.  I think he did a great job.  I was also impressed by how black his black healed out.  He said he uses some "Polynesian tribal black".  I don't know what that is but I want some!

All right that's it for today.  As always, thanks for checking out my pics and skimming through my psycho-babel.

BRB