update......i guess.

figure i should be posting something. i've been back painting 2 or 3 hours a day again after I got my new awesome itouch and realizing i could just be facetime talking to Sarah while being productive instead of just staring blankly at a constantly refreshed facebook news feed talking to her on the chat.

that being said, i have been taking more video than photos in an attempt to build up some stock so i can start editing videos together :) im way stoked on that.

any how heres some stuff to look at



skull, tattoo ink on water color paper. pretty small-ish, 6x 15?



I hung 5 calendars around my parents phone when my Dad was out of the house and Mom was at work, haha.



finally got to use this reference.



seriously running out of places to put these paintings.



tacos with butch! ok cam was there too



they left with these!



i got this!



stevens stomach family crest tattoo is soooooo close to done.



finally ate at the Irish Pub, this burger was described as being the size of a leprechauns head



did this stuff all in one day



started this, currently working on 3 paintings :)



husker million dollar bill chocolate, with trains plains and automobiles



yumm yumm



reference for andys hawk



and hopefully our final drawing :)

trying not to fall behind..

Even though im happy to be not posting everyday anymore, i still need to try and post at least once a week. Hopefully in the near future the house will be recieving some long over due high speed internet and wireless router. then i can put together nice posts from home on my days off :)

but until then this is what ya get i suppse :)



this last saturday was my first offical 'snow day' working 50 ish miles from my home, and more or less being my own boss being able to call 'snow day' is a definit perk.

the weather man said 'maybe some flurries' that translated into roughly 10 inches of snow and 30 plus mph winds. it was outstanding! ive seen alot of snow, for example last xmas when it snowed nearly 27 inches in under two days, but ive never seen it drift like this.

down town had drifts five feet tall blocking entire side streets off. it was awesome, i wish i had a snow mobile haha.



so what to do with an off day? my mom also ended up with the day off so we headed to the grocery store for baking supplies and of course fried chicken supplies.




charles was there stocking his meat dept. later on he came by in a 4x4 truck and we drove around town threw all the snow. it was so bad that trying to move it before it ended was pointless. the city plowed 4 blocks of one street. stoped to look back and it looked like they hadnt even done it! needless to say it was a challenge even finding the road! we crossed some areas that had 3 feet of snow on the road!



any how, when we got all we needed we headed back to the house and this is how much snow had accumulated on the hood of my car in the 25 minutes we were inside!



once home EYE didnt have any idea were to start!



my dad said " EYE might have an idea..."



mom replied "EYE know! banana bread!



i started in on mixing it all up. im used to cooking not baking so all the measureing was kinda weird to me but alas i forged forward.



minced up some walnuts and decided to actualy make muffins, banana nut muffins. sooo tasty :)



then onto these sorta sugar cookies. they turned out nice and soft not all crunchy, and we put a ton of orange rind into them so they taste like citrus/sugar cookies. so so good :)



had to make peanut butter, chocolate star cookies. my personal favorite winter time treat :)



ohhhh yeeeaah :)

any how we actualy made another couple dozen cookies that are a craisen/ orange cookie. but they needed to sit in the fridge for 3 hours before segmenting them out and baking so i spaced out on taking a pic of them. sorry :P



of course a day kicking around the house my dad found about 30 more 'lost' match box and hot wheels cars. thinking its time to move the track we set up previously to a bigger/warmer spot of the house and see how these new ones run the circut.



and heres a sneak peak of two 3/4 sleeves im working on. im working on roughly 4-6 big tattoos that id realy like to show off, but instead of my habit of tons of progress photos im attempting to wait until they are done and finished to show. but i promise theyll be workth the wait... hopefully lol.

ok, ok, its true

im food powered. its a little bit of math but if you can hang with me ill try to explane.

1. get some good referance



2. add a smoked pulled pork sandwich the size of your head, and a side of red potato salad.



3. result, a first rough draft line drawing!



4. reward yourself with some crab wontons with blackberry sauce!



repeat and watch the progress before your eyes!

But there's only so many hours in the day.

So much to do, not enough brain to do it.

One of the down sides of putting so much thought and time into my tattoos is trying to find the time and brain to do it.

Figuring out your own individual work flow helps a lot in keeping the work load manageable. If I had to start a sleeve everyday I'd probably have a melt down.

Giving myself time between projects keeps it manageable, and with color studies and all the prep you don't really need to think about it past the first sitting making it a lot less stessing to tattoo. You can just put your head down a d work, focusing just on technique alone. It's a whole lot of work but in the end it makes things easier and your end result better.

I can see why some people work in one set style and genre. Though for me I think it'd feel repetitive I can see the advantages.

Right now I'm currently working on prep work for the following:
A Japanese 3/4 sleeve of a snake and flowers
A bio mech full sleeve
A eroupean/ sculpture/ Victorian referenced full sleeve
A dr. Teeth and the electric mayhem half sleeve
A good/ evil /zombie bible referenced half sleeve
A fancy elaborate lettering half a forearm

And that's just stuff I'm trying to conquer right now. That's easily 4-5 totally different styles or influences to draw pieces I love from.

My brain just may melt

Sleepy sleepy

So tired.
This is some of my drawings for work from the last 2 weeks. Some are pieces in progress some are waiting to be started. All of them drained me. I put a lot of thought into my tattoos and I still thunk it's not enough.

This music award show is aw.... Wait for it

Ful! Awful. Good god no wonder I don't listen to the radio. This shits awful, and to top it 90% of the 'performers' are dancing around out of breath to a shitty recording of there song. Ugh fail

all in a days work...

So i try to make every tattoo i do a tattoo that im excited about doing. it just makes the whole process so much easier when im working on my 6th hour of linework when im just super stoked about how its going to look.

while that may make it easier, getting to that point isnt all that easy sometimes.
example, i was brought this referance photo for a tattoo. now, its not all that bad but honestly ive seen this tattooed about a dozen times and i have never liked the results no matter how well the tattoo was done.



add to that he wants to make the hair even longer so it fills nearly half his upper arm with random hair filler and of course add some spider web back ground. sigh.

try one:



i did finish the head band/ scarf on this simply for the fact that i knew i wouldnt enjoy tattooing it. i dig skull tattoos but i put so much effort into the shapes and textures that adding paint on top of it is hard to do and feel like it looks right.

onto try two:



i realy liked the hair on this one as well as the designs on the face. i tried to create a rendering more reliant on the linework this time. however the clients a 5 foot nothings skinny mexican kid so the composition just wasnt going to fit on his shoulder and look right no matter how far i shrunk it down.

so try three for the day:



i ended up putting the 'spider web' into the scarf design and tried to further push the simplicity factor/ line structure on the skull to make it readable with face paint on it etc. to balance that out i bumped up the amount of detail in everything else. a ton of attention to line weight and color contrasts and i think this may be our winner. ive got a few days until the tattoo needs to be started so ive got time to think and redraw a few more times to something im excited about. but i think this is preety close.






oh yeah, and REFRESH! :)

3/3 less depressing?

I've previously talked about the amount of prep time I was trying to put forth towards my tattoos. But what I failed to note is the amount of composition drafts and piles of reference used to even get to the point of starting on a final idea.

I have not only thousands of random photos, paintings and sketches I've found and kept for some reason. Some little thing that jumps out at me. Maybe the hue of a sunset, the filigree on an old sewing machine or knife.

But also tons of self produced reference. I talk to people at the studio very regularly about not googling "flower tattoo" but rather "flowers". Using some one elses tattoo as reference is using a starting point that has already been filtered threw some one elses mind, ideas, and skill. Start as fresh as you can!

I try to take that as far as I can as often as I can by creating my own reference material. All you tattoo people out there know when you see that sugar skull girl or that battle worn skull that Josh, and Nikko, and Nate and every body that's ripping there tattoo is using the exact same reference photo. Mike D. Touches on that a little in his keeping it real book/ DVD about trying to find your own fresh reference. It'll be worth all the effort when your joker tattoo doesn't blend in with all the others.

Any how I do this a few ways all of witch involve seeing your reference in real life. Wether I make a quick sketch, cell phone photo, or a purposely lit composed photo.

From flowers to rocks, seeing it first hand unlocks doors in your mind that a pic off the Internet just does not.

Examples that come to mind, when working on drawing koi I went out to catch a great big carp to look at and photo first hand. There are differences between a koi and a carp but it's close enough. Any how, moments after pulling it out of the water I saw so many little details that explained so much of what I'd seen in Japanese tattoos. Why in old tradition japanese tattoos does the koi have these weird W shaped scales behind the head? Because they do!

Example two, I was in NYC at the met a summer or two ago and came across there display of a Japanese garden complete with giant crazy looking rocks. I had always assumed much of the Japanese tattoo style was just that, stylized. But turns out in japan they actually have big crazy looking black rocks! So many little details and things seen in real life unlock answers to questions that would have taken  hours apon hours of sketching to figure out how to make it look right. There it is right in front of you! Things you'd never have even thought of!

My trips to the northwest reveal to me dozens of new bright and amazing flowers I'd never dreamed of existed. Now in my folder of amazing flowers to add to my compositions when you just can't bare to do your billionth tiger Lilly tattoo.

My final example explains my top photo. Skulls! I've drawn skulls for decades! Referencing other artists and piles of photos, and yet when my girl friend handed me a complete skull it was like a football stadium sized light went on in my head every time I twisted or turned it! It answered questions I didn't know I even had inside of 5 minutes of looking at it. Having it to turn, pose and light has become amazingly beneficial to my current work.

So take the easy road to awesome work and go take a walk with a camera, catch a fish, look at rocks!

This took forever to create on my phone

Blog day two:

Well my Tuesday-Wednesday weekend was over so this morning I packed up my stuff and headed back north and back to work.  And I got a whole block away before I got a phone call reminding me of the 27 cans of spray paint that I left behind. So a quick trip around the block and I was on my way, for real this time though.

I saw this fella outside of a gas station near council bluffs, and seeing how my car happens to run on dinosaurs I pulled over to fuel up and snap a shot.



I got to work a bit early and snagged a super tasty smoked cheeseburger from the BBQ trailer that is across from the studio on week days. Www.yourhouseofq.com should link you to him, soooo good. Nothing compliments a rainy day like smoked food :)



Well maybe a smoke break Sean decided.



Having had an appointment reschedule to tomorrow I had some rainy day time to kill and scribbled up a skull, fire, roses combo. I generally change how I'm drawing roses about every six weeks, this round I've been focusing more on the shapes of the pedals rather then the overall compositions or centers. I mixed it up a little today using a photo reference from  my yard and drew some roses that were more closed then I would normally draw them. I think that working on this phases could help in future compositions as the stem and thorns are more focused on so I could use them in place of were i might other wise use some fillegry, or some sort of neuvo-ish flourish. 



After my last appointment I cleaned up and headed towards home. I've got a 42 mile drive home from work every day so it definitely  gives me some time to think. I've got alot of things in progress but not quite ready to post, and I didn't really want to make posting past projects a norm. It seems a little counter productive to my goal of being more productive. However nothing to exciting happened today so I thought I'd post about my first ever BBQ competition I was involved with last Saturday. That's close enough to current to count right? Under 7 days?

Yeah I think so.

So one of my best friends Charles, Aka the butcher... Because, well he's my butcher haha. Any how Charles and I are giant food nerds waisting tons of hours glued to the food network, taking food focused multiple day road trips and trying to cook new yummy food.

Now as lovers of BBQ and spice when we heard that our town of Hawarden was having a rib cooking competition we new we had to get in on it. After a meeting with all the involved teams we found we were each cooking a minimum of 50 pounds of 9 back slabs of ribs. 

Realizing that we wouldn't have a rig large enough to smoke that quantity we opted for a grill/ oven process. And we started early. 

This was my view at hours only seen by me in extreme situations. You know, like biscuits and gravy or bbqing ribs :)



I had to tattoo a few people so after we had our marinated, grilled ribs placed to cook in the oven I took off to work. Charles ran back and forth between the two houses when I was gone keeping an eye on things and his dad helped him get everything set up at the event.

I got back into town just in time for the gates to open and among all sorts of fancy smokers and tents I found charles



We had a great time, the weather was wonderful and we had nearly twice as large of a turn out as expected!
Here are some random photos from the evening.







Knowing that it was a crowd vote it was hard to pick which way to go with the ribs. We didn't want to go to bold or spicy as we were trying to please the masses not a panel of judges, and over all we ended up a scant 3 votes short of third place out of 12 or 13 teams! Awesome! I had a great time and can't wait to go bigger and better next year. Hopefully I'll have the whole day off next time so I can be more active instead of a great sue chief. Still fun though :)

Alright that seems like enough for tonight, I think I'll go draw.