As promised, Camila’s completed dragon (following that long-ass post with all the dragon sketches).
A Deluge of Dragons
Camila, my ex-roommate of 3 years, finally decided on what she wanted for her tattoo - a small dragon based on the zodiac symbol she shares with her little brother. Now the thing with dragons, I find, is that they’re easy to draw if you’re trying to make them look as fierce as possible. The tricky part with this one was creating the perfect balance of fierce and delicate - made extra tricky by the fact that I know the client way too well.
By the time I sent her about the 6th drawing, I was definitely aware that I was over-doing it. Overwhelming a client with choices might seem like nice customer service, but anyone with a modicum of experience knows that it only makes the decision-making process harder. This I knew perfectly well, yet still I couldn’t stop second-guessing myself, over-analyzing, and drawing more dragons….
Finally, after weeks of deliberation, we settled on dragon #8 (or did we go back to #7?). In the end, I’m definitely pleased with the one we picked, and despite my lack of professionalism on this project, I thought I’d share the drawing process with you. Finished tattoo tomorrow.
A gory Moby Dick inspired piece - the guts spilling out from a dying sperm whale for John. Some of the undigested items I considering placing among the intestines: squid tentacle, human bones, harpoon, rainboot, umbrella. Decided the latter two would be cheesy, so kept only the human bones. Photo of tattoo to come when complete.
Tash’s cedar-waxwings-and-antler piece, all done! Nothing goes with short shorts quite like a gorgeous thigh tattoo.
My legs are stiff and sore from the BMO Vancouver Marathon yesterday, so I thought I’d cross-train my upper body strength instead and colour in this skull’n’roses drawing.
Another sketch for my sleeve, which I’m going to hereby dub the Renaissance Sleeve Project (and tag all relevant posts accordingly). This time I wanted to see how it would work with a sculpted-from-stone look, so I drew from a lot of Corinthian column references. Not sure if I love it, though. And for those of you who wanna get technical and point out that Corinthian columns are classical, not Renaissance…whatever.
After that last lotus tattoo I did, I realized that a very large proportion of my recent work has been flowers. And I was thence inspired to draw this fearsome orc wielding a mighty, riveted phallus. (It also gave me a chance to finally test out my new 60-colour set of Faber-Castell pencil crayons.) And I know that the background sucks, but my background-illustrating abilities have been on the decline ever since I started tattooing.
I was simultaneously struck with the desire to play World of Warcraft again, missing being virtually immersed in a beautiful illustrated fantasy world. So I went to download a trial version, but it turns out that there’s been about 3 new expansions since last I played, and the thought of all the boars necessary to kill in order to get to the new regions made me kinda dizzy just thinking about it.
