PP: Spending time at Shades of Ink - Day 2.

Today I had the pleasure of sketching up my own design for an actual client.

Today a client came into the studio enquiring into getting a japanese style Geisha tattoo on his lower arm. Seeing as Vince had, had a look at my designs previously he asked me if I would like to design the tattoo. Of course I've leapt at the opportunity and under Vince's mentoring I have been sketching away all day.

The process of actually coming up with a design can be quite time consuming but thanks to years of collecting Vince provided me with plenty of resource materials in the forms of books and flashcards.

While sketching I changed the design several times making sure the composition would compliment the form and curves of the placement, this took me a few tries however and Vince reminded me to not get too bogged down in the small details as the tattoo itself wouldn't be massive. This was something that I found a bit hard to grasp at first as when working in my own studio in Bath there is no cap on how much detail I can put into my work.

I also had to bare in mind the way the lines would look on the skin so I had to make a mixture of thin and thick lines on the final design. The way Vince showed me to create not only a good looking design but also a good looking piece of flash was to set the design once finished on a lightbox and then sketch the design again. This allowed for more confident mark making and also gave me the opportunity to remove aspects of the design as well as add in new ones.

As the appointment for this tattoo is booked for tomorrow it gave me enough time to get a design that Vince and I were happy with, I just hope the client will love it as much as I do tomorrow!