First Day at Fineline

sketchbook pages for Aug. 18th

Just had a great first day working as an informal “artist in residence” at Fineline Tattoos in Oswestry as part of Inside Out’s “Art Works” project. Can’t thank Rena, Stuart and Keith enough for letting me sit on their sessions and making everything so straight-forward and easy. Sorry that I had to dash off a bit early, but nonetheless, had a very successful and productive first day.

Basically, got to sit in while Keith inked in eight stars on a young lad’s ribs. Neither of them minded if I sat there and sketched, so I was able to spend the whole two hours watching, drawing and making loads of notes. If you think drawing straight lines is hard enough on paper, just think of doing it on stretchy, moving skin. And, despite the best efforts of the lad whose skin it was to not move – you can’t help but twitch when it gets to the fifth star and you know you’ve still got three left!

Does anyone remember Olivier Kugler‘s travel illustrations that he did for the Guardian? I loved those – and I think I’m going to do something similar with these sketches: a sort of double-page spread of annotated drawings from the session I sat in on as a way of getting some of the visuals fixed and making a record of the day.

Beyond that, I’d really like to do some fairly large-scale digital paintings from these sketches – in fact, I had thought of setting up the laptop with an extra monitor in the window of the shop so that people could watch the painting evolve. Anyway, I can tell that this project is going to be massive amounts of fun!