Went to the zoo with my mom and my kid. It was awesome. We got to see kangaroos and feed the giraffes.
Wonderful day spent with family and a pretty great zoo as well.
Holy Sepulchre Cemetery
•December 13, 2012 • 1 CommentI was going through my camera today and realized that I never posted these photos. Jessie and I went to the cemetery the beginning of October and these are some of the highlights (I take way too many photos every where that I go now that I have a digital camera).
It’s a great place for a walk (or a run) and the sculptures are truly inspiring!
All of these are taken from the section East of Lake Avenue. It would take a couple more days I think to get through the section West of Lake.
Enjoy.
tattoos? yeah, I got those too
•November 27, 2012 • 2 CommentsI know that lately the posts have been about painting and drawing – but I am still tattooing my little heart out as well. Unfortunately a disproportionate number of those have been of the medical variety lately (this happens every year at the end of the year as everyone is rushing to get in before their deductible recurs at the beginning of the new year).
So here is some of what I have been up to that I can share with you.
I am super excited about this piece that I have been working on for Eric. In the process of researching his tattoo theme I have stumbled across SO much cool stuff! I would need 7 bodies to fit everything on that I would like to make a tattoo from. Eric has been super fun to work with and has really helped form the vision that is coming to life on his skin.
These tattoos meant a whole lot to this guy to have done and he waited patiently for a really long time to have me make them for him.
This tattoo is being made for an “old” customer (it’s not a dig Rick) who I love spending time with. After many years it was a joy to see him even if it was a sorrow that brought him in for the tattoo. This is the first session. We will finish up next session in December and I hope to get better photos either then or after it is healed.
And then there’s this girl here who is often to be found whining about how she never gets to make skull tattoos – posting TWO in the same blog. This one is on Bob and it is the start of something EPIC. I am very excited and am not going to give it all away quite yet.
There is an existing tattoo on his forearm that you can see on the right side of this photo – I didn’t make that one.
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I started this Virgin of Guadalupe tattoo on Luke’s ribs. Although he held out like a trooper, it was too much to do in one sitting.
More soon and I will have finished photos of these soon(ish) as well.
Figure Drawing Class – November 26th, 2012 and better photos (I hope) of some paintings
•November 27, 2012 • 2 CommentsSome silliness from figure drawing class last night. Not sure what prompted this – but this is Steve setting up to paint the models with watercolor.
This is the what Steve was working on (progress as of the first break)
and what I did during the figure drawing sessions:
I had to color correct these – so they still aren’t excellent representations, but you get the idea.
Last Painting Class for a bit
•November 26, 2012 • Leave a CommentNo Monday classes next semester – so that leaves me out. Hopefully in the Spring I can head back again, but at least I got several paintings finished (I think they are finished) this time that I am pretty pleased with.
I think I am beginning to find my voice with my painting – relying less on the reference and more on my imagination. Still working on the skills and making the paint do what I am imagining that I want it to look like – but that will probably go on for a lifetime.
I spent part of today trying to figure out what the heck I did with my #4 round brush (never did find it) so I didn’t feel quite as comfortable today as I did the last couple of sessions. It’s amazing what changing tools will do to the appearance of the work.
Anyhow, enough yacking. Here are some pictures.
Added some more little modifications to this one. Think it is finished now.
This one I made when I was in Hell City this year.
There were some things that I liked and some things that I didn’t like about it. Figured I would rather start over than rework it.
Obviously this one has a ways to go yet.
Someone had asked me how long this class and the figure drawing classes are. The Monday morning painting classes are three hours long. So each of these posts that I have put up chronicling Mondays has been a single three hour session.
The figure drawing classes are by the hour. I normally stay for at least 2 hours and will stay for the entire 4 hours if I can.
I will try to get better photos of these on the other camera and post them here if I can get clearer ones without glare (these were taken on the iPod, so the resolution is pretty low).
Figure Drawing x Two
•November 20, 2012 • Leave a CommentIt appears that I am behind in my posting. On top of that I was in Boston over the weekend again and missed painting class on Monday, so no new painting progress to share with you.
Here are the last two figure drawing sessions. As always, not yet where I would like to be, but glad that I am able to keep going. Practice, practice, practice.
Is Two a Series?
•November 12, 2012 • 5 CommentsTrying to find my way through the whole painting thing. Some of my struggles will be evident here.
But I am happy with a lot of things about the last few paintings and these last two in particular.
and then a short break while we watch Steve paint for a little while so we can all see how simple and easy painting is : )
He is working on another student’s painting for her in these photos – I am set up to paint directly behind where they are working.
and back to my painting:
Now that I am looking at this I realize that I did a tiny bit more after this last photo. Nothing earth shattering.
Realizing that we pack a whole lot into those three hour classes! This painting was all over the place and I really almost gave up on it a couple of times. It’ll be interesting to see where these go from here and if they do turn themselves into some sort of series.
Holly and Hashtags
•November 12, 2012 • 2 CommentsWhat do tattooers do when they have taken time off? Why go visit other tattooers and make tattoos of course.
This weekend I was able to head a tad bit East and spend some time with some really awesome people. I will post the photos and follow them with the hashtags from the weekend.
More details on these can be found at emptysetprojects.com
I love my friends and am so incredibly grateful to have had some time to just hang out and relax.
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And if you want to follow these sort of things, I am on Instagram under “justteejay”
Progression of a Design – Celtic Ouroboros
•November 6, 2012 • Leave a CommentThe basic premise was to create an Ouroboros with celtic. The client had selected a knot from the Book of Kells that he really liked and wanted me to pull inspiration from.
This was the image that he was most drawn to:
Which would have been great and pretty straightforward (since he liked the head and wanted it to be similar)… but (there’s always a but)…. we had used the same knot for inspiration last year when we fixed up one of his old shamrock tattoos with this:
So the challenge became to draw something that he would like and would work, but would not look too much like the existing tattoo. We went back and forth with several knots that he liked, but they were all far too complicated to work well as a tattoo (at least at the scale he was talking about). I was honestly pretty stumped until he sent me this one:
While the knot was still too complicated as it sat – it did provide me with some nice inspiration. Since the Ouroboros was going to have a dog head anyhow, filling the interior with dog and bird animorph knots would work out pretty well. So off to attempt to simplify the knots to something that I could work with.
My first attempts at creating the knot were a little too simple and I thought kind of on the cute side.
So I made another version which I liked much better:
And then for the “really fun” part – to convert the linear knot to work around the body of the snake/Ouroboros. Since its head was the dog – I decided to start with the dog head biting the bird (which is connected to the dog) to repeat the concept throughout the knot work.
And then to apply the tattoo to the client. We did not finish completely in the first sit (it’s a VERY complicated knot). So he will be coming back in December to finish the coloring. I will update this post with the finished photos at that time.
November 3rd Figure Drawing and some (hopefully) better photos
•November 6, 2012 • Leave a CommentYesterday was another short day at Figure Drawing. I was only able to attend for two hours again. More bummed than usual as the long pose that they are working on is stunning. But two hours is much better than no hours!!!
I did seem to be having some issues with proportion again. But this just further illustrates the need for practice. One of the other artists was showing me a new (to us) artist’s paintings online last night. Absolutely breathtaking! (His name is Jeremy Mann, his website is RedRabbit7 ) On another day that kind of level of work would have just been discouraging (and/or made me more jealous of those who have been able to attend art school) but I decided that even if I can never get to be that good – doesn’t mean that I can’t keep working to be better.
And here are some hopefully better photos of the paintings that I have been working on the last couple of weeks. The in progress shots have been taken with my Ipod which doesn’t have the best camera. These are taken with my regular camera.
The first two are pretty close to finished – may just need to be signed and sealed. The third definitely needs more work.
I liked that you could see a little bit of “Fear of the Dark ” in the background behind this, so I didn’t crop it down all of the way.
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