The painter reborn

Jamie and I have been trying to find decor and pictures to decorate our house.  We have been wanting some kind of picture for the Tattoo room because it is the first room that you see when you walk into our house.  We have looked all over and looked online, and anything that we thought would be cool enough, was also really expensive.  Nothing just seemed to fit the room right.  After a lot of thinking, I decided that if you want something done right you have to do it yourself.

When I was in school, all I cared about was art.  I took all kinds of art classes and liked to consider myself an artist and painter.  I did a lot of both acrylic and oil paintings when I was younger, but that all went by the way side when I started doing tattoos.  I figured that right now, with the time that I have on my hands would be a great time to pick it all up again.

I wanted a picture that was to do with tattoos since it is for the tattoo room, so I took a picture of my hand holding the tattoo machine and used that as a reference to do the painting.  We went and bought a canvas.  We decided to try and find the biggest canvas that we could so that it would really fill up the wall.  We ended up finding a 36" x 48" canvas and I got to work on it.

First I drew the design on the canvas in pencil so that I could get the basic layout of how the painting needed to be.  Then I did a background.  I wanted it to be a choppy kind of black and white design fading from black on the edges to white on the inside as it gets closer to the main focus of the painting.  Oil paint takes about a week to dry, so I did the background and left it for two days so that it would be surface dry and wouldn't mix too much when I started the rest of the painting.  When I carefully touched the painting two days later to check how it was coming along, to my surprise, the painting was completely dry!  I knew it had been a while since I painted and I couldn't remember how it should really be at this stage, but I was sure that it shouldn't be this dry.  When I did a little investigating, I discovered that I had accidentally bought acrylic paint instead of oil.  Well some painter I am, I can't even tell the difference! ha ha. I bought some new tubes of black and white OIL paint and started working again.  At least the background was fully dry now.

Next I started working on the glove.  Now I am getting to the part where I will find out if I can still do this or not.  I got a little bit of practice with the manipulation of paint with a brush when I did the background, but I was really nervous to find out if I still have the ability.  I know that I have been doing tattoos for years, so I am well practiced in art, but this was a whole new world to me and I couldn't help but doubt if I could pull it off.

I got the glove about halfway done, and it was actually turning out the way I wanted it to.  Yay! I can do this.  At this point I was getting pretty excited and all of my nerves and doubts started to go away.  I just hoped that I could keep it up through the whole process and finish the painting without hating it.  Especially since where it will be hanging, I will see it every day.  It would drive me crazy if I was looking at all of the flaws and things I want to change every time I walked into that room.

I started work on the tube and grip next.  Now was the real test because this is where the detail really came in.  So here come the nerves again. Fortunately my excitement to see the finished product overpowered my nerves and so I continued to paint.  I had forgotten how this feels.  When I was younger, I was always happiest when I was doing a painting.  It is almost a type of meditation or zen feeling.  I can't really explain what it is or where it comes from, but I can definitely tell you that even though I enjoy doing tattoos, I don't get the same kind of satisfaction out of it as I do painting on canvas.  I made a lot of jokes about how it was nice to have a canvas that doesn't flinch or complain or bleed!  I was free to do my own thing without any outside opinions of how it needs to be.  Well, that isn't entirely true.  I may not have had a person concerned with what was going on their body, but Jamie was still a little concerned about whether it was going to look good enough to be in the front room of our house.  So, she voiced a few opinions here and there and I had to reassure her that I will make sure that it all looks right and that I will white out the canvas and start over if it didn't.  Luckily, I didn't have to do that.  I am really happy with how the painting turned out, and now I am ready to do more.  I have some plans for some other rooms in the house and I will be sure to post some pictures and tell you a little about them when I get to that.  Meanwhile, here is the finished painting as it hangs on the wall!