So what’s up everyone. Since I last updated, I’ve started tattooing real humans and unfortunately that led to the lack of updates on this blog. My apologies. As much as I wanted to post “results” of the tattoos, I’d save that for later when I actually get better. For the last month or so, I’m limited to doing tribal work – simple designs using only solid black, with no shading whatsoever.
This is the stencil for my first tattoo on a human – ever. It’s about 18x 10 cm – awful huge for a newbie! How did it go? It went badly and I didn’t even finish! 3 hours into the tattoo, my client had to leave, and I’ve only managed to line everything and shade the outer part of the alien face thing. Lesson learnt – don’t bring your easily bored girlfriend to your tattoo session.
Here’s some of the other stencils I got to do this last month. They say doing tribals is like shoveling coal – it’s long hours and repetitive work pushing in the black stuff over and over again, but I believe in a learning process! Through doing all these simple tribals, I’m figuring out to do clean crisp lines (it’s the hardest), solid colors, constant line quality, all the fundamentals before I could even handle more complicated work. As much as I’d love to do colorful Neo-Traditional or ornamental work, I don’t think I’m capable to do that type of work to an acceptable standard just yet. Like they say, everything in its own time.
How hard was tattooing? It was tough beyond expectation! I thought I’ve nailed it down pat on practice skin, but human skin is an entirely different medium. There were nights when I went home so frustrated, despite doing all my best, I felt that I failed terribly, and all I wanted was to give in and give up tattooing. Yes, it was that hard. On top of that I’ve always set high standards for myself and my work, so when my results didn’t meet with my expectations, the one who’s most upset was not my boss or my client, it was me! So I did the only thing I had to do – try harder on the next tattoo, and get better, and hope that one day I’d be pleased enough with my own work that I’m able to post it here!
So that’s that. Perhaps I’ll update you with some colored work next month – no more tribals! – all fingers crossed.
amelstrange 