Fixing my old tattoos

These are the existing tattoos that are on my back. They are approx. 17 years old and not very great. The one on the right (the darker one) was the first one. I got this on 6th Street. in Austin TX. I wanted one that I had drawn but to get all the detail the tattoo artist said it would be HUGE and I wasn't ready for that at that time. As these things tend to be now or never and I wanted to get it that day,  I thumbed through their book and picked out the flower. The round one was done a year or two later in sketchy part of Dallas near where I lived that has since been torn down and a Super Target was built on the grounds. This one was a Japanese Crest. It was 1997 and the year of Japanese art in the Dallas Public Schools.

 This is a sketch of how to combine the two existing tattoos into a coherent scene. I would get a second Japanese crest and the two of them would form the bicycle wheels.  The foreground would be in color and the background in black and gray. Two of my friends and I are planning on going in August and getting our tattoos all done at the same time and then going out for drinks (or going home for ice packs.) When I showed the guy the plan, he said "wait, let me guess, this fits your back exactly."and Marianne said, "well, she is an artist' I also designed her tattoo which is a dragonfly. He seemed a little sad as he said designing the tattoo is part of what we are paying him for!

Here is a photo of the bike I want in the scene. (April 2012, St. George, Utah)

Tuesday Art

Today I was lucky to be able to stay home all day and make art, the only time I left the house was to go to Marianne's to make more art!

Last week I bought a bunch of small chunky 4 x 4 inch gallery wrapped canvases. I have had an idea I wanted to try and that was to use them backwards, so I would have the hole in the center to work with.

I bought some modeling paste and used a pallet knife to cover the back of each one and fill in the gaps and staples. I let this dry and then took 3 of them to Marianne's to work on.

These are not finished yet...but my idea is turning out. I will show the finished pieces in another blog post.

Tattoo $75

This morning I took 4 of my encaustic pieces and turned them into an assemblage. I added a Buddha Head by screwing the base into the background with an L bracket, the two dolls are glued as well as the blocks of wood are glued on. I had made the background piece after the 3 smaller pieces and didn't put any wax in those 3 spots, so the glue would stick. This piece is named "Tattoo" because of the Henna designs on the purple pieces.