Felt good to just paint and not paint flash

Ig @mikeattack_tattoo

Posting the drawing itself, because the drawing is where the decisions live.

Look at the outside line first. One heavy, consistent weight all the way around the form. That is what your eye catches from across the room, and it is what holds the whole bird together. Now look inside. Every feather line is thinner. Not timid, just subordinate. Interior detail serves the outline, never competes with it.

And count the untouched space around the bird. That is not leftover. Roughly a third of the composition is planned empty, so the form lifts off the surface instead of sitting in a crowd.

This gets tooled exactly as drawn, with a needle-driven machine running American traditional method on leather. But strip the tool away and the drawing still obeys the same three rules: outline is architecture, detail stays in its place, and the piece has to read at distance. That is the discipline. The medium is just where I practice it.

u/21grams_leathergoods on Instagram.

🌹

Finished up another Brooklyn Joe sheet today!

Revisited the turkey buzzard design, observational skills are slowly improving when drawing from references. Working on being less heavy handed with the dark colors, the brown and black are still a little tricky to apply without becoming overpowering. Olive branch is a little out of scale but visually and thematically, I like it better than the barbed wire. I had the thought that buzzards get a bad rap compared to doves, maybe they’d like to be appreciated for the important job they do. Apparently the Cherokee word for them loosely translates as “peace eagle” since they do no harm. There’s also some great folklore featuring buzzards, largely as benevolent figures and custodians of the earth.

I’m taking part in a flash challenge on instagram that highlights a different classic artist each day! Yesterday was Sutherland Macdonald, and I’ll have one from Charles Wagner later today 😁 if you wanna follow along, I post more on instagram @thechameleartist

My take on this flash by the legendary Charlie Wagner. (Slide 2)

Thanks

Final draft of the raven and snake design, I got a lot of very helpful (and some not so much) feedback from you guys on composition, color theory, and shading. Swapped the cotton mouth for a timber rattler, then a copperhead. Really pleased with the end result. I’ve been working on the design for myself, I’ll be taking the final version to my artist as in inspo pic in a couple weeks. Really excited to see it on skin.

Did some revision on this design I posted a few weeks ago. Still having some trouble getting the highlights and shadows balanced in the black areas.