Hello Kitty Desk Stand

I made this Hello Kitty desk stand. I'm very happy with it. I hope you like it too. :-)

Tattoo #2

 

Man, this design is just Mad. There’s no dead space at all in this tattoo. There’s something going on everywhere. The largest areas of nothing are the red parts of the flames. I like the rim-light on the flames. It is high contrast and rich in color. The hat is brilliant too. Again with the rim-light. The big splash with the 13 in it fills the whole top of the hat. There could have been a detail on the hatband. I like the shading on the brim of the hat too. Again, it’s a rim-light.

It’s interesting that the skull has hair, eyebrows, and a mustache. The hair is stylized too. It sticks out from the head in a straight line, strange. I would have thought that being a tattoo, the skull would look mean, but this one looks sleepy, with a cheesy grin. Eyeballs and eyelids along with the red lips make this a strange skull indeed. The goatee is stylized too, being a diamond shape. Again the skull has rim-light shading.

Interesting that some parts of the crossbones are not rim-lit. The ends of them are however and I guess they’re the important bits.

The lettering is amazing. I have never seen a scroll flopped over anything in all my years of looking at tattoos. It’s a wonderful new take on an old icon. Again the scroll is heavily shaded and rim-lit.

It’’s interesting how the flames turn into dripping blood at the bottom. Playing cards are very hard to draw effectively as they don’t offer the artist much to work with in terms of natural opportunities for shading. Here Karl has given each card a boarder, which is something. And then he’s gone for the opposite of a rim-light. I guess you could call that a “fill-light”. It fills the centre area but leaves the edges of the cards in darkness. The club on the Ace of clubs is very wonky, but it works and doesn’t look out of place. When I draw things, I like them to be “correct”, this is often a bad thing.

Most of the tattoo’s background is filled with the spider web. It’s a chunky, fully rendered one, not just lines. I haven’t drawn a spider web before, but it appears that there is a rule to the shading. Each diamond shape is shaded the same way. If you look at it diagonally, one corner is in deep shadow, while the other one is rim-lit.

Flaming dice on each side, fill up some open space. The shading on the dice seems complicated, so I’ll leave it for the moment. Below the spider web is a great pattern of dots and stars. The dots are all uniform in size and there are two different kinds of stars. One star is the traditional five pointer and the other one looks almost like an asterisk.. almost.

The top of the design is crowned with darkly rendered swirls. They don’t seem to be representing anything, like wind or water for example. They just seem to be a nice pattern.

I missed that the skull has a cigarette in a holder. I missed it because in my opinion, it’s too thin, and needs to be chunkier. There is also a lovely plume of smoke rising from the end of the cigarette.

The nose of the skull is a spade. A graphic element in an unexpected place.. nice. The teeth are represented with a simple grid. There has been no attempt made to show different shapes in the teeth or different kinds of teeth. The gap at the front is quirky and a strange inclusion. I like it though. Also a gold tooth to put detail in where it can be fitted.

WOW.. Now that I’ve looked at this design so closely, I REALLY want to do my own version!

Tattoo #1

 

I have a lot of tattoo magazines and when I flick through them I enjoy what I see very much. I have wanted to draw more tattoo designs for a long time and there’s some cognitive thing that’s stopping me. I am just not clocking what tattoos I like and why I like them. I went through a very large tattoo book and only found about 40 tattoos that I liked. I photographed them. What I want to do is look at each and find out what it is about it that pushes my buttons. Hopefully this will lead to me being able to draw my own designs. Knowledge is power.. I guess..

I like the overall pattern of dark and light in this design. The skull is warped and not at all in drawing, but that doesn’t bother me. The style is so strong it makes up for that. I like the way the skull is nested in amongst the waves. I like how the waves turn into dots on the upper left. The waves don’t really look like waves much come to think of it. I like them just the same. The skull has deep indents on it’s surface that wouldn’t be there on a real skull. There seems to be an internal logic that there should never be much space that doesn’t have dark and light tones in it. The only exception to this seems to be the eyes.

The design just finishes in a slightly blurred line at the bottom and the top finishes with the top of the skull’s head.

Inhale Cheers in Color

I drew this Charlie Sheen Cartoon and finished coloring it today. I hope you like it :-)

Inhale Cheers

Here is a cartoon of charlie sheen I'm working on at the moment.

Diamonds

In the beginning, when I was first born, did I have an ego? I wonder about this. I really don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that I had a brain and a mind, and where the mind is, the ego surely follows. I feel I am on safe ground to say that God made me with a mind that was built to form an ego.

This ego is the primary way people interface with each other . Sure, we can all sit in a circle and experience each other “being”. We can stare into the faces of our sleeping children, or hold a loved one in a tender embrace, all without accessing the ego. But if you want to get any “real world stuff” done, then you’re going to need an ego and it’s accompanying little story.

The way all these egos dance with each other across the planet is beautiful and the inspiration for this sort of interplay is nothing short of divine. We were fashioned to mix with one another in this way and it is good.

It is important to note that when we experience another being’s ego, we are not experiencing the other being. Just as when we shake hands with another, we are merely experiencing a small facet of the physical diamond, that may indeed reflect the brilliance that shines within, but it is not that brilliance.

When this fact is understood, when we understand that our ego is a good and natural part of our body, just like a hand or foot, then we can truly use it as a tool to display ourselves and to experience another being in a very unique and fascinating way.

When you hear another being talking, you are hearing ego. When you speak, you are speaking ego. And that is a desirable and wonderful thing. Your ego is not you and their ego is not them. The ego is a way that these seemingly disparate life energies can interact in a practical setting to achieve some concrete result in the world of form.

I think the most beauty can be found when a being, conscious of the fact that the ego is merely a tool, interacts with a being that isn’t. It provides all manner of opportunity for love and selfless giving as well as a forum for the nurturing forth and worship of the other egos inner brilliance.

But real bliss is found when two souls meet through the near transparent veil of consciousness.

The Games of life

So I made this story. Well not by myself. I had help. Much of it chosen, pre fab and tested for street cred. I have tweaked and chiseled this story for 47 years. I’ve worn it in too. It fits me like a glove. The stickers on the back of my car show the others who I am.

I’ve put a lot of work into it. The entire package, from fashion choice to a salad bar of opinions and beliefs, show everyone how well I’ve coped with existing in the unconscious world, which is situated somewhere between a rock and a hard place. I am the swiss army knife of answers to life’s questions.

How could anyone not like this wonderful creation? Hard to believe, I know, but it happens. Mostly I try to ignore the ones that have made a shitty job of their own story. But sometimes they end up as co-workers or my father in law. Then i have to stop ignoring them and raise the defcon a notch or two.

Then the games begin. Some civilized like, “conceptual chess”. Some not as civilized like, “You said that she said”. And everyone’s favorite, “ Is this just a game to you?”.

Sure, the answer is to leave all this behind and just “be”. Disconnect from the ego and the little story of me and be present, conscious, aware, in the now.

So you no longer associate your self with the story. But that story took a lot of time and effort to make and although it’s not perfect and it’s not actually real, it’s still pretty cool. And now everyone else is still playing the games, only now they’re playing, “Hey he’s left his sandcastle unattended, let’s flatten it.” Although I’m no longer playing, how can I watch them trample all over my lovely creation?