#I got lazy rendering this so I added a bunch of effects and stuff

[vamytas]

A (Very Rough & Ready) Guide to Alex’s Tattoos

I’ve been putting this off for a LONG time because I like to be meticulous especially with character visuals but with the amount of tattoos Alex has, especially on his expansive canvas of a 6 foot body, trying to find a pictoral example for EVERY bit of ink is... YEAH lmfao.

* As a guiding note, the indicating ‘left’ & ‘right’ etc. is from HIS left and right. All heart designs are typical cartoon shape unless stated as (anatomical).

NECK //

Underneath his ear lobe, on the left side of his neck is a hand holding a needle -- designed to look as if it’s pierced through his skin. At the top of the needle is a red thread which curves semi-loosely around the back of his neck and wraps around a red heart below his right earlobe.This can only be seen if you lift (or pull) up his hair since he never, if rarely ever, ties it back high enough. 

LEFT ARM // 

FINGERS: Simplified red rose gradually blooming from little to index finger, from bud to full bloom. This is just below the top of his knuckles, below them (closer to his nails) on each finger is a stem with thorns.  HAND: Bull face, directed towards viewer -- lineart with minimal black shading. FOREARM: Basically a flash tattoo / pork-chop sheet mixture (see here & here  -- middle pic). Omitting anything explicitly religious (apart from a cross or two) and culturally appropriative. Includes a range of panthers, snakes, skulls, hummingbird with beak in flower, handcuffs, full figure Betty Boop, inkwell and heart wrapped in barbed wire. All interspersed with Felix the Cat faces and little stars to fill blank spaces. Very clear linework and simple shading, only using bright colours: red, green, blue and yellow. Some of these are done by Alex himself, his first tattoo on his own body being an ouroboros snake.  UPPER ARM: Much of the same as above, except with the addition of a Sailor Jerry style pin-up with blonde hair in a corset and heels. Also a chain band just below his shoulder. SHOULDER: Lucifer from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. First tattoo with complex colour-shading, done by his first employer in London who he worked with as apprentice. 

RIGHT ARM //

FINGERS: Skeleton anatomy on the full-length of his middle finger and knuckles, the rest of his fingers (near nails) and his thumb are blocked with plain black. HAND: Continues with skeleton anatomy. Entire design is clearly inked style shading (as in nothing that looks anatomically realistic) like this. FOREARM: Contemporary & post-modern designs. Inner forearm is covered with praying mule from And the Ass Saw the Angel book cover. Outer forearm is design pictured on the left here, picture was taken at an exhibition which I have the guide to and artist credit but .. whoever edited it  helpfully didn’t align credit with the picture so I need to manually look up each artist listed to HOPEFULLY find the one who did it.  UPPER ARM / SHOULDER:  Literally cannot describe but is piece by Jef Palumbo. Due to technique being incredibly skilled, I am taking full advantage of fictionality and tattooist with these mad skillz existing in early nineties for Alex’s sake... let him have this ..

CHEST / TORSO //

The largest / most expansive singular piece on his body. His chest and torso are fully covered with a design I lifted off a Jean Paul Gaultier add and tried editing onto his bawdy for promo graphic a while ago -- unlike graphic, the tattoo would still be in the same colour as Gaultier ad, but yellow of skull would be red instead -- less tribal texture and more lined mark-making like the skull featured in me blog background to the left of Alex’s head (I can’t find the pic in my folder..)

BACK //

UPPER BACK: This is where a little imagination is required as I’ll just be listing a bunch of images but they’re all collaged in a cohesive/overlapping way like Duncan X’s back -- pic taken by Liam Sparkes. So;  Saint Sebastian by Myles Karr down Alex’s spine. On the left: text from this photo by Tish Murtha complete with exposed brick effect -- in black and white. On the right: text from this, including a stencilised Pauline Boty rendered in Lichtenstein-ish comic print style, with matching Lichtenstein bright colour scheme. These three images together and with a certain scaling form an arc shape across his upper back, and the thread mentioned earlier on the back of his neck hangs an inch above the Saint Sebastian’s hands. Spaces in between filled by Jemma Jones style flash tattoos. LOWER BACK: I’m getting lazy so again, just imagine in style of Sparkes tattoos summat like this mixed with this on the left and again more flash tattoos imposed between and over blank spaces.

HIPS //

Handprints on each harr harr.

ASS // 

🙊 Only his partners know ... unless you attend classes where he poses for life drawing

LEFT LEG // 

THIGH (FRONT): Entire leg is surrealist/dadaist themed. Whole front of thigh is coverd by this collage by Otto D’Ambra. THIGH (BACK): Under his butt: Eliott Lane. Under that, another Otto D’Ambra. Around them, these (1, 2) by Caleb Kilby, and top middle illustration by Kathryn Kirk. KNEE: Left eye of Siouxsie Sioux, (right eye on his right knee). I’m imagining these are also embellished around the edges by a circular labyrinth symbol pattern to fit the shape of his knee joint.  SHIN: Fish-head man by Kerry-Anne Richardson, black and white. CALF: Hannah Hoch collage, but in black and white -- rendered much like D’Ambra tattoo on the front of his thigh (semi-realistic pointilism shading for woman’s face, simplified basic outline for images surrounding it). ANKLE: Smoking bunny by Sarah Whitehouse. * Spaces between these main pieces are filled by flash tattoos in style of Liam Sparkes. Entire leg is only black ink.

RIGHT LEG // 

THIGH (FRONT): Entire leg mirrors left arm in a mixture of classic tattoo designs/styles with pop-culture & illustrative character leanings. Multi-eyed devil (??) piece by Kerry-Anne Richardson. Full colour. Fishnet leggies by Just Jen on inside of thigh. THIGH (BACK): Skull emerging from chrysanthemum by Ben Shaw, underneath that: crescent moon by Kerry-Anne Richardson. KNEE: Aforementioned Siouxsie Sioux eye in labyrinth. SHIN: Wolf in sheep’s clothing by Iain Sellar.  CALF: THIS!!!!!!!! by Charissa Gregson. He hasn’t got a name yet.. suggestions welcome. Below him, more Iain Sellar stuff. ANKLE: Peachy-keen, piece by Holly Ashby. * Spaces in between main pieces on thigh are filled by Dennis the Menace & Peanuts panel. Out of sheer self-indulgence I’m adding this lady. Every other blank space refers back to Sparkes and Jemma Jones flash tattoos.

He doesn’t have any on his feet because he’s ticklish there..

#▏▪ HEADCANON. #(THIS IS AS MUCH as i can muster now #will reblog when his legs are decided on #FOR NOW HAVE THIS !!!!!!!!!!!!!! #only visual descrip of tattoos. . meaning isn't elaborated on #squints and looks askance #EDIT: HAVE Added legs. . ideal #will probs add to this in future since .. amount of tattoos ppl can have is !! a lot !! #especially since alex prefers nothing that covers a whole limb .. apart from torso . .

[conceptanddesign-blog1]

"A crappy sketch is better than no sketch at all!”

Rob Garrott Anyone who’s taken one of my classes has heard me say

I’ve always been a bit embarrassed at my drawing skills. I started drawing like all kids do… crayons and those big fat pencils that kids always end up with. I loved drawing Star Wars X-wing fighters and Mach 5 race cars. But, my drawings always lacked “polish”. They never felt like something I wanted to hang on the wall. I think the problem was that drawing was never the end goal for me. It was a way for me to focus my energies for a bit. To clear my head. To that end, I suppose the real goal was just that… To get the idea out of my head and onto paper. Once the idea was out of my head, I tended to lose interest and move onto something else. I had gotten my point across with the drawing and that was that.

I've never been to art school, but through a series of twists and turns of fate, I discovered I had a real talent for creating on the computer. In my late 20’s I started working at an entertainment advertising firm. The pace was intense. We had to create logos for TV shows to present to clients in ridiculously short time scales. It was not uncommon for us to have only a couple days to turn out 20 or 30 solid ideas that could be presented to the client. Luckily for me we never ever showed the client our sketches. All that stuff stayed in house. We had to show finished logos that looked exactly as they would in a magazine ad, or on the television. This meant that I didn’t need to draw well. I just needed to get my point across. Then I could dive into Illustrator and/or Photoshop with a clear goal of what I needed to create. This was when I really started to understand why sketching (no matter how bad the sketches are) is such an important tool for creativity.

Years later through yet another series of twists and turns of fate, I found myself teaching at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Remember how I said that I’d never been to art school? But, I discovered that I had a real talent for teaching. (Not at first though, I was pretty rough… but that’s for another article.) I taught motion graphics courses using After Effects and Cinema 4D, and at first the courses were really just about the software. But after a few semesters I decided to change things up and really focus on getting the kids to communicate a story. It might be a commercial for a product or an infographic piece about an environmental cause, but regardless, it was a story. Turns out the best way to get the point of your story across is with words and sketches… Imagine that. This practice of storyboarding, of sketching the sequence of events in your story, had long long been a practice of the advertising and cartoon animation industries. But, motion graphics artists, not so much.

I think the problem is that motion graphics as an art form, as an industry, began to flourish with advent of desktop computing. Programs like After Effects made it possible for an artist to create design and animation “on the cheap”. All you needed was a relatively inexpensive computer and buttloads of labor and time. The advent of digital photography has made us extremely lazy about taking pictures, and I think the same thing has happened with motion graphics. It’s so easy to just open After Effects or C4D and start animating. But, technology doesn’t free your mind. Technology clutters it up. Software is complicated, and it doesn’t always work right, and it doesn’t come up with the ideas. It’s just a tool for achieving ideas.

I’m currently working on a music video project for an artist named Dammien Alexander. It’s an abstract piece that will use particles and lines to communicate a feel of space, gravity, and time. It’s challenging. I’ve never been good at abstraction. I’ve always made animations about things. Carefully defined sequences of events that kind of write themselves. But, this project needs artistic abstraction. So, I’m approaching it in a way that gives me a structure to work within. I’ve brainstormed a bunch of scenarios based on the lyrics in the song, and now I’m systematically animating each one. Every shot starts with a crappy sketch of the sequence, and that is used to focus my work. The video below shows the progression from sketch thru each of the refining renders. My Sketch book stays open right next to my keyboard, and I can look at it while I’m working.

Every time I get stuck on a project, it’s because I haven’t taken the time to work my ideas out on paper ahead of time. I just dove in and started making cubes, and guess what… I got nowhere. It isn’t until I’ve sat down with my sketchbook and done a few thumbnails that I begin to see my goal clearly. A pencil and paper WILL free your mind.

The only thing you have to think about is your idea (and how sharp your pencil is).