Self Portrait!

The shop is closing for the weekend early tomorrow and I've been dying to try out a portrait for ages, pretty much as soon as I started in the shop, so I decided to take my supplies home and give it a shot.  Had a lot of fun doing this one, its a self portrait on pig skin and took just over 1.5 hrs.  Its my first attempt at a portrait so might look really bad to someone that is used to doing them, but for me, im delighted! 

I was at the Midleton tattoo convention last weekend and picked up my own bottle of One ink, I used this along with Kuro Sumi black outlining ink and also three different shades of Kokkai Sumi greywash inks.  I used my Micky Bee with a 5 liner, my Glyn Flew with an 8 round shader and also a custom shader that Alan gave me with a 7 mag.  I pretty much used the round shader for all the shading and only used the mag for softening out some areas.  The pig skin took the ink well, but theres absolutely no judging the different shades of ink without watering them down yourself, overall good bit of practice!

WIP Oldschool Doc Marten Tattoo

Alan had a cancellation this evening and asked if I wanted to do the oldschool Doc Marten tattoo I designed for him last week.  I've been dying to get started on this so was more than happy to set up my workstation! 

Alan couldn't have been more helpful, he gave me a load of tips along the way and showed me a few different techniques.  I once again used the Micky Bee, this time choosing to use a 5 liner because of the size and number of lines in the design.  This was completely different to using a 7 liner, every tiny shake seems to be highlighted and at the start there was more than one.  Alan had a look at the way I was holding the machine and showed me a way to hold it so that I have my middle finger sat into the groove just above the needle tip, this then acted as a kind of guide so that the needle was always at a constant depth and also to steady the vibration of the machine, it also took a bit of weight off!  Paul showed me this technique before but it just didn't feel right, luckily enough after a few more lines on Alans leg it became a little easier!

Just over an hour after starting the linework I was finally finished and Alan had a look at what I did to his leg.  He gave me a few more pointers but overall seemed happy with the tattoo!