Thrive Road Trip and Miscellany

Generally I try to find an awesome tattooer that I get along with in my own town and give them all my business for as long as I live there... but last weekend I traveled specifically for a tattoo for the first time.

I guess I'm getting to be a bit of a "collector" as there are several far-flung people on my list now that I would love to get tattooed by someday...

Actually, I always meant to go to this place when I lived closer but never quite made it...

So, the place is Thrive Studio in Cambridge, ON. I got tattooed by Chris Anthon whilst my lovely niece got tattooed by Bryan Simms. Except for all the pain and cursing under my breath, it was a totally great time. Andy Gibson, their apprentice, was there too and they pretty much did an improv-comedy show while tattooing. How our tattoos aren't a big mess from all the laughing, I'm not sure.

Here's a peek - but I'm bruised and scabby right now so no point in showing off the whole thing yet. You can already tell how awesome it is from this shot though...

My niece got the Stoney St. Clair mermaid (that I re-painted and wrote about earlier here) but I don't have a picture of it.

Originally we were both going to get the mermaid but two things happened: 1) I saw this seahorse flash that Chris painted on his FB and I immediately fell in love with it and knew I had to have it, and 2) I got to thinking about mermaids and how what a mermaid does is be extremely pretty, sing beautifully (I can't sing and am only borderline feminine), and lure poor sailors to their deaths*... and that's just not what I aspire to in life.

So, despite the fantastic tits, I opted out of the mermaid. I was mostly into the tail and scales anyway - and the seahorse has both.

(Also, I was born in the year of the horse - which doesn't really mean anything to me at all except that it makes me have a certain fondness for horses that I wouldn't have otherwise because I wasn't raised around "horse-people".)

(And I like to swim.)

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This is a random picture of a fence near Thrive. I liked the acorns.


This is my little collection of old letterpress letters. I don't have a letterpress but I just use these like stamps sometimes. Why did I post this picture?


Because I used these stamps on the tab of this thank-you-card I made for Chris Anthon.

The creature (demon? monster?) is based, but not copied exactly, from Amund Dietzel.

And if you pull his tongue...


He says, "U R RAD!"

... which I thought was pretty awesome...

Unfortunately I get so nervous and awkward about giving people stuff like this that I have no memory of whether it appeared that the recipient liked my offering...

..but I enjoyed making it and I think it must be obvious that it was heart-felt... and that's good enough for me.

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OK. Time for bed.

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* My niece is young and good-looking in a way I never was and has a killer voice to boot - so the mermaid goes better on her. I'm not saying she aspires to kill sailors or anything - the mermaid just works on her in the same way I think the seahorse works on me.

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hearts and rope

Here's a cute little flashy flash painting. I opted to not add colour just because I thought it looked cooler on my shelf that way.

And here's a gratuitous cat picture because those little toes sticking out while the cat watched the sunset was irresistible to my camera.

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flash dump

Truth be told, I'd grown tired of blogging. Tired isn't even the right word... it's more like I started to feel like it was totally pointless and therefore I wasn't doing it.

However, a friend encouraged me to keep her up to date with my drawing/painting progress and so, with that small prodding, I'm back. I thank her for that because it is nice to know that people care.

So... here are some things...

This lady head is done after Amund Deitzel flash but I'm not going to finish it because I'm unhappy with the shape of her face. (Actually, I have already redrawn and inked her again and I'm not finishing that one either because I just can't get her to have the aloof/angelic look I want... I will eventually come back to her and try again because I like the image but I needed to move on and try something else.)

This bird is from the Ben Corday Tattoo Travel Book and it is the first bird I've attempted. I didn't have any brown ink so I had to use some water colours. I'm not loving my current paper selection or the water colour paint. Anyway, a learning experience.

This one was really fun.

Having gone through art school and done a lot of "life drawing", I've drawn many a penile region in my day... but, as I was never an adolescent boy, I don't think I've ever drawn a random, gratuitous "cock"...

Now I have...

This whole image is so delightfully ridiculous that I enjoyed every minute of drawing it.

It is from the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume 1. The caption says it is a "humorous youth tattoo known by convicts as 'Duet with sleighbells'". Here you can see my drawing beside the original.

Here's a scan of the inked drawing.

Here it is hanging on my fridge because I thought it was an "A+"... and also funny to use the "This is ART" magnet (picked up at the San Antonio Art Museum) to hang it.

And lastly, one I did yesterday.

Everything on this sheet is Ben Corday flash and I tried to keep the inking style as close to his as possible (so, more brush-strokey in some places than smooth, gradated washes).

Here's the central lady with her original counterpart in the book. I really need to go get some brown ink and maybe some (caucasian) skin tone - because mixing the inks doesn't seem to work very well and I had a hard time getting the colours of the original (which I was trying to do here... for practice...)

Anyway. that's it for now. Thanks for looking!!

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