Having had a look through my portfolio, I’ve decided to replace some of the weaker pieces that I like less. To do that it seems necessary to totally redraw the concept, and reuse none of the previous work’s parts. Seems obvious really, but I thought it bore mention. Seems like a lot of art is reworking old ideas again and again until you finally like them
Anyway, here is a picture of a Tibetan prayer skull that I drew at work a couple of days ago, that I’ve since added lines and shade to it.
So, I intend one day to become a tattooist. I’ve decided, and I will pursue it with vigour. I’ve been working towards this goal for about four years now (a buttload of drawing), and I’m finally getting good enough, getting the contacts. I work hard to do this.
It’s my understanding that to become a tattooist, you need to go through a traditional apprenticeship to gain any respect in the industry. You just can’t get a tattoo kit and start tattooing people and calling yourself a tattooist – the equivalent would be to order a bunch of pills from the internet and then call yourself a doctor because you ‘prescribe’ them. Can you imagine how much that would piss off every doctor who ever found out? Not only would you be taking business away, you would,( much, much worse) probably be doing more way harm than good.
I want to gain the respect of the tattooing industry, so I want to do things the hard way.
How to be a tattoo apprentice? What I have gathered from industry magazines and websites and tattooists is: Be an awesome artist, in a way that will translate to tattooing (i.e. probably not collage), be a really sincere, dedicated person, genuinely care about the tattooing industry and don’t be looking to make money from it. Also be ready to receive a lot of rejection, because you’re going to be doorstepping every tattooist in your area, and as many as you can beyond it, and all but one of them will say ‘no’. Some will say ‘no’ angrily. Also be ready (really ready) for the grim realities of endless cleaning. Seriously, it’s like 90% wiping up, 9% drawing your arse off, and eventually, 1% tattooing.
So, to that end, step one, a portfolio. It’s evolving and upgrading fast – I hardly kept one for years since things would go into it and be obsolete so fast that they’d just be back out again in a few days (this isn’t because I’m super-gloriously awesome and have been for years, it’s because I started off terrible,and was improving incrementally on a daily basis).
Once I’ve scanned and taken pictures of all my recent work that are portfolio pieces, I’ll post them as Part II.
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