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.

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.