Inked!

A few years ago, my friend Jo asked me to design her a tattoo as a Christmas or birthday gift. (It’s been so long since that I forget.) I felt really uncomfortable with the idea of something I designed permanently stuck with someone. What I consider good design one day, I rue two years later, if even. So I kept putting it off in the hopes she’d lose interest/forget about it.

JO NEVER FORGETS.

She gave me a concept a few months ago, and more recently pushed me to show her something. She wanted an image of the time of Miss Havisham stopped her clocks in Great Expectations with flame-like elements surrounding the clock. I reused the clock from my website, downplayed the gears, and emphasized the elements she wanted.

I worked pretty hard on this, though I had no clue how much detail could be included on a tattoo—figured that any excess could be edited with the tattooist’s discretion. And really, I didn’t expect Jo to go through with my design. I figured she would realize the error of her ways and go to a professional tattoo artist to better realize her idea. At least giving her this, I could say I tried.

Then this morning, she got it done.

I gotta say, I feel a lot better now that I’ve seen it carried through. Of course a lot of detail was lost in execution, but I expected it. The core of the design shines through—I think the tattooist did a great job! It’s got an elegance to it that I think will last well, and I’m feeling really honored that Jo believed in my skills enough to go through with the tattoo. I’ve been doing a lot of work in the past couple weeks, but this is definitely one of the more badass projects I’ve been involved with.

{ April 4th, 2009 at 10:11 pm | 1 comment }
Tags: illustration, personal projects, photos

Illustration project

We had to do an editorial illustration for one of Virginia Tech Research Magazine’s articles, and I chose to cover a piece on “volunteer tourism,” where people do charity work for fun … as in vacations and such.

I was really interested in the other-ing aspect, as well as a part of the article that observed that some tourists are insistent on meeting the people they helped out of a wanting to be thanked. People mean well, though sometimes we can be oblivious to our own motivations.

I wanted to go for a retro 50s vibe. It started out along the lines of atomic age advertising, but I ended up leaning towards Mary Blair’s style, mainly because I had a lot of fun mimicking it.

{ November 7th, 2008 at 12:02 pm | No comments }
Tags: class, illustration