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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russian cat in a hat - visual telephone game

Today I drew this cat from the front cover of Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia II.

I don't own the books but I'd like to - they are mesmerizing.

I'll get them someday when I'm feeling rich...

A word about the progression: I printed out a small thumbnail from the internet, then drew from that into my sketchbook, then drew the larger version on brown paper from the sketch book drawing, then painted over that loosely with a small brush without referring to the previous drawings.

It was really interesting after I had done all those stages to look back at the original source picture and see how much it had morphed!! Like a visual version of the "telephone game" but with only one player. See for yourself...

I really liked the "grittiness/toughness" of the original so I went back into mine with a Sharpie to toughen it up a bit (I also messed with the contrast in photoshop on this one).

It would be interesting to keep going with this telephone game, trying all sorts of media and always working from the most recent drawing... but as with all things, my attention span is limited...

Right now it's time for bed... maybe tomorrow I'll draw it in crayons or something... we'll see.