Exhibition

For my exhibition, my Charles Dickens colour piece, my Nero sculpture piece and Toms religious sleeve was on display. For my exhibiton I was trying to express how tattooing can be seen as a fine art. I think the exhibition went really well, I think it received enough attention and people were inquisitive which is always good.
[Me (Left) and Tom]

Finished Colour Charles Dickens Sculpture Piece

This is the original image I used to create my tattoo design. The sculpture is of Charles Dickens in the Liverpool Art Gallery. I'm more comfortable using Black and Grey, since its the most common thing I do, doing colour like this was really stepping out of my comfort zone. I am happy with the way the piece came out, its on the thigh and I think it makes a suitable piece for its placement. I think i handled colour well on this piece, usually I find it much more difficult, but I managed to get nice blends using colour.

Realism Sculpture

I have been working on this A0 realism sculpture piece, taking influence from Jim Dines work but still keeping to the realism approach.

Jim Dine - Glyptotek Drawings

I've been looking at different artists that I find relates to my work. I've been introduced to the artist Jim Dine, who is a American Pop Art artist. He did a collection of images from Glyptotek, an art museum in Denmark. I like the roughness of his work, nothing is clean and precise which is not the usual for me. I like works of art which approach realism as close as they can. This style is really rough but still has a style that is pulled off within the image, I love the use of dark tones and  high contrast. 

Portraits

I have been practicing drawing alot of portraits, taking a lot of influence from artists like Kelvin Okafor and Paul Cadden. Im trying to push my skills further and getting to the stage of Hyper Realism. 

I've began tattooing a lot more portraits also, paying close attention to detail, tone, texture, depth, saturation etc. The portrait on the left is Sofia Loren, the client asked for a sugar skull initially, to have a better looking tattoo and to do something I am interested in, I suggested a portrait which we then transformed into a Los Muertos Girl.

Charles Dickens Colour Session (PART 5)

I think the colour sitting went very well, for the figure I used Black and a mix of greys, I think against the solid colour it has around it, it will allow for the figure the be focus point. The leaves we're difficult, everyone i've worked with tell me that yellow is one of the hardest colours to pack and they we're right, but I think they have come out very well. There is still one more sitting yet to go, we have to add shades of purple behind the figure to emphasise it a little more.

Nero Sculpture

This was a great piece to work on, I think I did good with this. Originally it was a really thick outlined piece there was nothing special about it and it didn't help it wasn't finished. Since the design looked flat I decided to re-line/re-shade all of it. I used a smaller liner than what the original artist had used, using the smaller needle allowed me to create more depth without intruding to much into the artist's work. I added the dark shade in the corner of his eyes, the cracks, finer hair with a liner. I used reference material so I knew the direction of the light source which allowed for a better outcome on the piece.  At the end of this tattoo I added white highlights using a liner to give more depth  and to over emphasise the cracks on the figures face.