It's mearly Movember!

In the spirit of Movember, I am offering free fingerstache tattoos for whoever would like one... eh hem... anyone?

No seriously tho... I am growing a moustache to support Movember, and you can show your support by donating here.


"Each year Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in Australia and around the world, with the sole aim of raising vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and depression in men.

Money raised in Australia is shared equally between programs targeting prostate cancer and male depression. Funds are committed to our men’s health partners, the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue – the national depression initiative and the Movember Foundation. Together, the three channels work to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world class programs in the fields of research, education, support, and awareness"

For more information check out www.movember.com
Donate at my profile:  http://au.movember.com/mospace/220781/

Pop on his bike

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Portrait

I've started the next portrait, again of my Pop (because I couldn't decide which photograph to do, so I figured do both!) It's not finished, but I figured I'd show some of the process. Again, working from an old dark, poor quality print out of an old dark poor quality photo makes it a bit tricky when it comes to detail.

 

I'm thinking about drawing portraits on a pay what you want base, to help raise money for the Kane family who is raising support to work in Cambodia for 3 years with Interserve. You'll get the original drawing, and the option of having it appear on my blog or not.

If you are interested in commissioning a portrait, please let me know.

The portrait era begins

And now it's time to try drawing some portraits. I'd love to be able to do black and grey portraits really well, like Kat Von D. There are so many BAD portrait tattoos out there... I really hope I never add to them.

This is my Pop from when he was in a motorcycle club in his younger days. Drawn in HB pencil. I haven't finished the background yet as I'm not 100% set on that particular style of frame on the portrait. The old photograph proved to be tricky to catch the finer details of areas like the eyes. I will have to look into how to translate the tones of an old dark photograph into a better-balanced portrait.

I'm taking requests for portraits, if you have any loved ones or portraits that you would like to have drawn. If you want to email me the photo, or upload it onto a website and give me the link. I'll do my best!

More birds

So... I was getting ready for bed... and my pencils were just sitting there... and my sketch pad happened to be open at a new page... so I just thought I'd sketch a few original design ideas...

Mr Bluebird's on my shoulder

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It's Friday night, so I decided to finally pick up my pencils again and start drawing. I've been wanting to try the traditional-style bluebirds/swallows so I began looking the different ways to draw them. I sketched out all the ones in my tattoo mags and a couple of designs that could find online, but none looked as good as the ones my friend Bree has on her forearms. So I decided to start with that as a reference and copied one of them (hope she doesn't mind).

Then I drew up a few more designs based on that one but changed the wings, tail, shape and colours each time to try a few different styles, and develop my own style of drawing them...

 

They have come a long way since I started sketching them. But I've still got some more practicing to do before I can get the wings looking evenly spaced and more natural. I also have a few other perspectives to draw them. I plan on drawing a whole sheet that looks like they're snapshots of the same bird flying through the air... not this weekend tho.

Grapefruit Celtic Tattoos

I finished my school work last night, so I downloaded a few guides to tattooing . I got a bunch of e-books and videos with information from how to set up your machine; to hygiene and keeping everything sterile; to pen-work and script lettering; and tips and ideas to practice with. One video suggested practicing on a grapefruit so you get more experience tattooing on rounded contours (like the arms etc). So I initially did some free-hand practice on a lemon, because I generally don't have grapefruits in the fridge.

The lemon was too small to do anything decent, so I eventually went out and bought a few grapefruits to practice on. I decided to copy a few celtic designs, based on a 'Book of Kells' colouring book I bought in Trinity College, Dublin. Celtic designs will be great to practice on because they're full of wonderful outlines that have parallel lines and they weave in and out of eachother. I think If I can develop the control to do celtic work well, outlining anything else will be easy.

I chose the peacock and angel design, as they were well rounded and would make good space of the grapefruit. I sketched it out first, using a biro, and then began tattooing...

 

The outline work at the beginning was a bit shakey, and then it got pretty good - much straighter lines and I just felt like I had more control. But toward the end, I felt like it was getting really sloppy again. I guess I've just got to keep practicing and practicing and one day I'll feel comfortable with the machine in my hands. 

 

 

My next job is to figure out how to use the 'stencil transfer' paper so I don't have to draw things from scratch while I'm practicing. I will just be able to find a design I like, transfer it, and spend more time practicing actually using the machine.