New tattoos: a fix up, Paradise and a first timer!

"I need a method for coming up with titles that are relevant and interesting cause this vague shit isn't working for me anymore." -That was almost the title for this blog post. seriously. I need to come up with a method, where I'm not begging some mystic muse for a clever title to these trivial blog posts every single time. And just a date may seem cool, but I just don't feel it.

Just a quick little thing.

A few updates on some ongoing projects, and a couple pics of new stuff too. We'll kick things off with the Island Paradise shoulder piece. This is a recent recurring piece that will soon demand a Collector Spotlight. You can see from earlier posts, we've got the sky worked in and various highlights. a lot of yellow and orange with a bit of purple, pink, and the blues framing out the sky. I've been working on a couple sunsets lately, and I really like how they have been turning out. A tricky thing tattooing a sunset, they can very easily go awry. To me it's like an abstract painting, that isnt... yeah, I know that probably doesn't make sense, but whatever. ha! So all we have left really is some fine tuning and bringing the yin yang element more into the piece by making it representative of the moon, sort of...

and the red beach chair looks inviting too.

 Then we have this new project, reworking a Japanese theme backpiece that needs a lot of love. First task was the tree, fix and finish. From there the plan is to go through and rework the entire piece, add more cherry blossoms, water, wind bars and a koi pond that will connect her lower back piece to the rest of the design. quite a project. This one and a couple of other recent cover up/fix designs I've been faced with have inspired an article post I'm planning actually about cover ups and fix ups. I tend to do a lot of these and developed... opinions, on the matter. but on with the pics.

This is what happens when your tattooist isn't properly trained in the craft.

 This one above is the before, none of this is me, as you may notice I am making that as clear as possible. but it is necessary to to show what I'm starting with. once the entire back is done, I'll use this image to really show how a piece can be modified and rebuilt. I list the artist as "unknown" though I am sure at least the collector knows who who did it, but I feel that's irrelevant info in the case of projects like these.

Ah yes! That's more like it!

So here we have the redone tree. This took about 2 hours altogether. I didn't mess around with any of the other elements of the overall piece, the cherry blossoms I had to resist getting into though, tempting as it was. The Tree was plenty though. Blending off the old color and shading was a trick. I had no way to tell what kinds of ink were previously used, and even if i did, the age of the piece meant they wouldn't just blend together anyway. So color matching and even adjusting the old color to what I had come up with was the only way. Normally I would also prefer to restructure the tree, but in a design like this where so much has already been decided, It was best to just enhance the existing design and keep the changes subtle. Most of what I'll end up doing with the piece is rebuilding the values, so that each element can be seen for what it is.

A close up on the branches and the ends, there was a good bit of cleaning up to do there. What I'm looking forward to for the next session is redoing the blossoms and adding in a TON more.

Finally, a simple anchor. nothing dramatic, but a good clean piece none the less. It's the collector's first tattoo, dedicated to his grandfather, a sailor, and he already has plans to expand it to a 1/3 of his calf.

Thanks for reading! and Happy Halloween! And may help come to the victims of Hurricane Sandy soon and swift! I am astonished at the devastation brought on by this "frankenstorm".