Tattoo

www.thegallerio.com

You don’t have to be an Artist to be a Tattooist.

At present I am a self-taught professional artist and trained tattooist, I am not yet a ‘Tattoo Artist’ as that takes years of practice.

I have been working as a full-time artist for 4 years so far and I have sold my artwork all over the country. My main mediums are acrylics and watercolour painted on paper or canvas. I decided to change my medium to ink and my canvas to skin as I wish to be able to financially support myself with my skill and even though I have sold over 50 paintings and held my own small private exhibition of 1st edition prints, it simply isn’t enough to substain myself financially, therefore I decided to look into tattooing and the more I learn about it the more I love it.

I finished my tattoo training in October 2010 and I am looking forward to the future and becoming skilled enough to move out of my home studio and into my own shop. I have lived all over the country and in the summer I will be touring in a campervan around Cornwall and tattooing as I go. I am also an avid writer – I have written 7 novels so far – and on the ‘Tattoo Studio’ page of this website I intend to write about my travels around Cornwall and the people I meet tattooing.

After my travels I wish to open an Art Galley and Tattoo Studio where I can practise tattooing and exhibit my artwork. Some people find art galleries intimidating and some people find tattoo studios intimidating, so when I bring the 2 together I may well have the most intimidating shop on the planet, but hopefully people will leave their preconceived notions of art galleries and tattoo studios at the door and come and explore my private little corner of the artworld.

That’s the future, but at present it’s practice, practice, practice.

Tattoo Design

www.thegallerio.com

I have just finished my first tattoo design for a customer, he asked for an angel that resembled Angelina Jolie for his back.

I looked over the internet for pictures of angel wings and Angelina Jolie and also asked my client to send me some images of other tattoo designs he liked to give me an idea of what he wanted.

The image below was my first idea for the tattoo. Big boobs, flowing hair and fluffy wings. I like this one as she looks vulnerbale and innocent. I managed to get out of drawing arms and legs by covering them up with hair and a dress.

It’s very important to get a tattoo design right as a client will be wearing the tattoo on their skin for the rest of their life. The first draft is only ever an idea, a starting point to work from, I never expect to get it right first time and I asked my client to be as picky as possible. After a short dicussion with my client he decided that the wings should be spread and he wanted her to be looking up. He told me which tattoo design he liked the most from the selection he gave me and I worked on that.

Below is my second design, I also like this one (I like them all – I can’t present someone with a tattoo design idea that I personally don’t like, I may have to design things I may not like, but I always have to be happy with the picture before I present it to someone, no matter what the topic is).

I like this design as she’s a ‘normal’ weight. She’s not too thin or too fat, she’s feminine, voluptuous. I realise the wings look different than normal wings and the feathers actually look like swords, but I still like the image, I think it works well as a tattoo. Art doesn’t have to be perfect to be right.

Now the angel was in the right position I showed my client the new design. He stated that he wanted her to be slimmer, her child bearing hips were a little wide, he also told me that the hair was too big and he was unsure about the dress, which was the perfect responce as now I knew exactly what he wanted, so I set about designing a new image. It was easy to change the image as I have the position correct and I finally found the correct wings that I wanted to use.

I asked the client for a picture of his back so I could draw the design in the right ratio. The design below is almost perfect. I much prefer the wings and the dress.

I then put this image onto the picture of my clients back to see what it would look like. I knew that this was the design that my client would be happy with so before I showed him the final image I tweaked it a little and added another set of smaller feathers on top of the larger feathers of the wings as the previous image would have been too plain for the large area of skin it needed to cover.

When I showed my client the new design he was very happy with it, but he wanted the angel to be bigger, taller and the wings to be smaller, so I altered the image in photoshop to get the size correct. The image below is the final image, which my client loves. I will straighten up any broken lines when it traced and transferred onto my clients back to make the perfect tattoo.

Ilove this design and I am looking forward to adding the shading and tattooing it, I am really happy that my client suggested that she was made bigger and the wings smaller, I think she looks much better bigger with the wings smaller. It’s a really is great when I am able to communicate with clients and we work together to come up with the perfect tattoo.

I will add the tattoo to my tattoo gallery when it’s been tattooed so you can all see it in it’s full glory.