Busy Busy

 So I got to tattoo my coworker/friend Kris the other day... He wanted a parrot with the banner and a rose, so he let me design it how I wanted. I'm really excited about this one, it's the second largest design I've done so far, and had alot of fun with different liners. It's really strange working around the achilles tendon... it was like tattooing a lizard skin or something. More to come on this after I start the shading. The plan is to make this in full color.

The next day a military kid came in and wanted some lettering on his inner arm. This one was great practice for fields of grey shading, and got to play around with more line weight and drop shadows. While I was working on this I noticed that my shading wasn't going in as smoothly as I had hoped. Good thing Bill walks in during this one and helped me out and told me to SLOW DOWN! I seem to want to do things fast.... gotta always tell myself to slow the hell down and of course as soon as I did, the shading smoothed out much better. Overall lining this one went ALOT better than the first inner bicep I tattooed, and got the thumbs up from Bill on the final outcome. Next time I think I'm going to omit the halo around the lettering, even though that's what the kid wanted. Bill had a good point about framing the design in the sense that if he wanted to add anything around this later on, it would be difficult to blend other designs into this one. Definitely storing that info for later.

This one came in last night. I was able to apply the shading techniques I learned from the lettering to this design. He chose a Hardy dragon from our reference and I changed it a bit. He wanted to change the claws... and overall I think I did an ok job except for the bottom claw. I think I could have done better with that one. I had alot of fun with this and it was the guy's first tattoo.

I don't tattoo again until tomorrow. Working sales tonight. I have an appointment tmrw night for a small hibiscus and plumeria on the ankle, and then Keone comes in for shading on his owl Wednesday.

Until next time....

ALOHA