Dahlia Tattoo

Exactly one month ago, as a five-day-early birthday present to myself, I finally got a tattoo! It's something that's been on my bucket list for several years, but I kept putting it off because I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to get a tattoo of. I considered Harry Potter quotes for awhile - but there's too many good ones and not enough short good ones, and I didn't want an entire paragraph written on my skin. Then, I stumbled on pictures of floral "watercolor style" tattoos on Instagram several months ago, and that opened up an entirely new world of possibilities. I was really drawn to the idea of getting something pretty and artistic on the inside of my left forearm, near the inside of my elbow - something that would act as an extension to my body of artwork (floral, colorful, and heavy on the symbolism), and something that I would love and appreciate - and be able to see - every day.

But knowing that I wanted a colorful flower wasn't enough for me (of course). I wanted my tattoo to mean something more specific than just "a pretty flower" or "beautiful colors" or "a reference to my floral artwork". I carefully considered (as I do with much of my art) what the message of my tattoo should be - that is, what type of flower I should choose.

Brand new tattoo!

I settled on a dahlia flower because dahlias stand for a lot of cool things, including wisdom, creativity and art, drawing upon inner strength to succeed, maintaining kindness, grace and dignity in the face of adversity, embarking on new adventures, making positive life changes, and forging my own unique self-identity. They also symbolize a lasting commitment - and I don't know what's a more lasting commitment than a permanent tattoo. :) My dahlia tattoo is a promise I'm making to myself 1) to be kinder to myself (that is, to stop all self-abuse and negative thought patterns and start treating myself with the same kindness and respect I show my friends), and 2) to be unashamed and unafraid to be who I am, feel the things I feel, or want the things I want.

I designed the tattoo myself. I drew/traced several images of dahlias until I got one that I thought would work. I also played around with the amount of petals, cutting some of them away to simplify the flower a bit, given the size it would be on my arm. Then, I blew it up to 8x10 size (to make it easier to paint), traced it onto watercolor paper, and added some light watercolor washes, just to decided what colors I wanted to use and where I wanted those colors on the tattoo design.

The watercolor sketch before I added black outlines back in.

I chose purple, blue, pink, and green for the colors. Purple is often associated with wisdom, elegance, intellect, depth, and beauty. Blue and green symbolize new life, fresh starts, and changes. The pink I added just because it's pretty - and I wanted a lighter color to make sure the darker purples and blues didn't make the tattoo too dark. These are also probably my four favorite colors (though I like so many colors, it does change a lot), and I have a lot of clothes in those colors, which will help my tattoo "go" with most of my wardrobe.

When the watercolor paint was dry, I went over the light pencil lines with a black Sharpie. Then, I used my copy machine to shrink it back down until it was the smaller size I wanted/the size that would fit on my arm.

Printing copies to try to figure out what size it should be on my arm. (The leaves point down to my wrist.)

The copier made the colors a lot duller, but I made sure to pick out with my tattoo artist the bright colors I actually wanted. I also told her I'd like to extend the extra pigment out further from the black outlines, to give it a more abstract/painterly quality. She used my to-scale copy to trace the design onto my skin, then inked the black outlines and the areas of color.

It hurt less than I thought it would, and went quicker than I thought it would too. It only took them about 1-1.5 hours to finish the tattoo. It also healed faster than I was told to expect, which was another nice bonus!

Here's what it looked like last week, three weeks after I got it:

It can be hard to get a good, clear picture of it... Not sure if that's the nature of this kind of tattoo, or just a problem specific to my phone camera (but I'm guessing probably the latter). :)

Now if only the weather would stop being so cold, maybe I'd actually be able to wear more short sleeves to show it off!

No New Notecard Sets

I really wanted to make some notecard sets of my "30 Days" and "28 Years" colored pencil drawings, to sell on Etsy and at the Paint Creek Center for the Arts in Rochester, Michigan (where many notecard prints of other colored pencil drawings and paintings I've completed are already for sale). My vision was to have a notecard of the entire drawing and then several close-up details of the flowers, available in box sets. I figured it wouldn't be too hard, since I've done notecards like this before. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

The problem is the size of the drawings. Each one is 22"x30", which is too large to scan all at once on the size scanner I have at home (which can only go up to 11"x17" size). I have made notecards of watercolors this size before, but I didn't scan the artwork - I took a picture of it with a camera. When I tried to do this these drawings, however, the pictures were not a great quality for printing. For starters, the only camera I have right now is the one on my cell phone. Usually my cell phone takes pretty good pictures, but because of the texture of the colored pencil and the detail in these drawings, I just couldn't get one I was happy with that didn't look either blurry or pixelated when I printed them out. I also tried to scan the artwork in four different 11x15 quadrants (top-right, top-left, bottom-right, and bottom-left), so I could at least get some good detail shots - but this also didn't work out as I'd hoped. I don't know if the problem is the colored pencil itself, the texture of the paper, or the fixative I sprayed over the final drawings, to prevent the colored pencil from rubbing off as I move it around and store it - but even the scans had trouble getting good quality images. Everything ended up out of focus, or still ended up pixelated when I printed them out.

I spent about two days on this. The first day, taking photos with my cell phone and trying to make those work. Then, more recently, I spent another day scanning them, cropping them down to the detail shots I wanted to use, and printing some out. Both times, I ended up wasting some of my notecard paper on images that were too pixelated to sell. It was more than a little frustrating.

I don't want to say I'm giving up, because I still would like to have notecard sets of those two drawings available sometime in the future, as well as for my "Race Bouquet (Stronger Together)" drawing, and the other drawings I'll be doing in that series - but I am putting this on the back burner for now. I would rather spend my time right now making artwork than figuring out how to make my own prints of them; once I finish my "stronger together" series I should have more time to revisit this problem and think of a better solution. Maybe the answer is getting a better digital camera, and getting some good photos of the entire drawing (and completely scraping the idea of also doing "detail" shots on notecards). Or maybe the answer is to send my artwork out somewhere to have it professionally scanned and made into high-quality prints (higher quality than I can print at home anyway). Maybe there's even some middle ground there, where I can find a printing service that has a scanbed large enough for 22"x30" paper, which can scan my artwork for me.

In any case, as much as I would like to say I have some new designs available as notecard sets, that's simply not the truth. I do, however, have many other colored pencil drawings, acrylic paintings, and watercolors available as notecard art prints. I recently restocked my notecards at PCCA in Rochester, MI, and I also have all notecards available through my Etsy shop. These make great gifts (and Mother's Day is just around the corner)!

"30 Days" - Rose #14

Often when I draw the initial outlines of the roses, I press down too hard with the pencil, so even after that outline is erased, it's still slightly visible under the layers of colored pencil, due to the indentation of the paper that the outline caused. To try to eliminate the visibility of those indentation lines, this is what I usually do when I start filling in the rose.

First, I color in *most* of the petal, but not all of it. I get as close to the pencil outline as I can, but try not to cross it. Here, for rose #14, I didn't quite go all the way to the edges because I intended to add in another color right up to the edge. So I used my base yellow to color in where the petals were, but leaving a slight gap around the actual pencil lines.

Then I went through and erased all those pencil lines. They're still pretty visible (as eraser smudges) at this point, but more layers of colored pencil will cover those up.

(I don't often show the step by step process of this first layer because it's hard to get a good photograph through all those smudges. There's too much blurriness and too little for the camera to focus on.)

Once the lines are erased, I fill in more of the petals, but again try to only go right up to where the pencil line was, without actually crossing the line. If you color over that line, even when the pencil isn't there anymore, it will stay the color of the paper and look like a line through your coloring - because the colored pencil can't drop pigment into the indentation your first pencil made. (I use a mechanical pencil to draw the outlines, which is thinner than the Prismacolor pencils I use, with the exception of possibly when they are at their sharpest point. But Prismacolor pencils are really soft, so good luck getting a sharp point that doesn't immediately break/fall off as soon as you touch the paper - or even the pencil sharpener - with it.)

By keeping the indentation line where the black shadows are, it doesn't matter as much if the colored pencil can't color over it - because I want to preserve the black paper there anyway.

Of course, I could just not push down so hard with my pencils, or not use graphite pencils that I want to erase - and instead use a colored pencil in one of the colors I plan to use to draw the light outline. But I don't always have the confidence to draw straight with a colored pencil (which is much harder, if not impossible to erase), so when I do have a graphite line as an initial step, this is what I have to do.

Once the initial yellow and pink markings were lightly in place, I started going over the pink with more weight on the pencil/more layers - so that the pink would get brighter. Then I added in some magenta in some of the shadows, blending that in to the light pink and yellow.

As I built up layers of color, I added some brown into the yellow, some blue blended in with the magenta shadows, and some hints of highlight with a light cream color. Often I put the highlights on the edges of the petals, but for this one I emphasized some of the middle parts of the petal with that cream colored pencil, to give it the appearance that the petal had some waves or wrinkles in it, with shadows and highlights.

Here is the entire drawing so far, with roses #13 and #14 just starting the middle row of five total rows.

Snapdragon Acrylic Painting

Yesterday's post showed the step-by-step pictures of creating my penultimate acrylic painting in my recent "Cloud Atlas Sextet" series; today, I will finish with the step-by-step pictures of the final painting.

Each is 8x10" in size and they are now all up on my Etsy page, available for purchase!

This painting is "Truths & Mistruths," which features abstract snapdragons (or foxglove? Something like that). As with the rest of this series, I used Liquitex Pro acrylic paint on Strathmore acrylic paper.

(Once again, I don't know why my phone camera captured little yellowish shadow lines for some of these pictures. I suspect it is because of the flickering fluorescent lighting I have in my studio room in the basement, but I don't know how to fix it so that my camera doesn't have this issue.)

This painting is for sale on Etsy here.

I started with a yellow-orange layer:

Then I added blue acrylic paint for the midtones:

Next, I added a bit of purple into the background, following the pencil tracing of the pattern I decided to include:

Finally, I filled in the background with a near-black (with just a hint of red/purple):

Here is the finished painting:

This painting is for sale on Etsy here.

Tomorrow's blog post will go into my detail about the inspirations for the names of these paintings, and how they relate to David Mitchell's novel "Cloud Atlas" (one of my favorite books).

Coneflowers Acrylic Painting

I finally finished the series of six acrylic paintings I started back in February. Each is 8x10" in size AND they are now all up on my Etsy page, available for purchase!

Because there are six of them, I gave them titles inspired by David Mitchell's novel "Cloud Atlas." I'll post more about each of the titles and what it means in an upcoming post; for today (and tomorrow), I am just going to focus on the process I used to create these paintings, showing the step-by-step "in progress" photos.

This painting is "Toppling Dominos," which features abstract coneflowers. As with the rest of this series, I used Liquitex Pro acrylic paint on Strathmore acrylic paper.

(Once again, I don't know why my phone camera captured little yellowish shadow lines for some of these pictures. I suspect it is because of the flickering fluorescent lighting I have in my studio room in the basement, but I don't know how to fix it so that my camera doesn't have this issue.)

This painting is for sale on Etsy here.

First, I traced the design onto the acrylic paper. Then, I started with a layer of yellow-orange acrylic paint:

Once all of the highlights were finished in yellow, I added a layer of blue for the midtones:

Using this same "paint by number" technique, I painted in the pattern that I traced into the background:

Finally, I went through and added in black acrylic paint (mixed with just a touch of purple/red) in the background to help the yellows and blues really "pop":

Here is the final, completed painting:

This painting is for sale on Etsy here.