Cody Deegan
I’ve been using my iPad and Apple Pencil for over a year to draw and design artwork. I, like a gazillion other artists, am using the Procreate app. One really cool feature of Procreate is that you can make custom brushes to draw and paint with. Today after my morning tattoo session, I decided to make some tattoo needle brushes so I could try practicing my tattoo techniques on my iPad.
I started by taking some needle cartridges and poking the needles into a piece of paper. Then I traced the patterns with white circles on black backgrounds and made 11 needle groupings. I imported each grouping into the Procreate app and created a brush.
It took a long time for me to get used to which angle the needles were facing, but after awhile I was able to actually practice shading. And overall I’d say I now have a great practice tool. I even submitted the brushes to the Procreate website to see if they could add them to their gazillion other brushes they have for people to download. Here’s what I created with them:
Not too shabby for my first try, eh?
I also forgot to post yesterday and tell about my son getting his first tattoo. He wanted a tattoo for Christmas (he’s 16, which is legal here in Nevada with parental consent) so on Christmas morning – even though I was super sick – I dosed up on DayQuil and started his tattoo. He lasted about an hour and a half before he decided he was done. My schedule is always busy so we decided we’d do the second session yesterday at 4:30 am so that he could still go to school afterwards and I could still go about my day. And he made it 2 full hours this time – woot! I think we still have another 2-3 hours before it’s completed so hopefully we can try again soon.
It might be hard to tell at the moment but the Tattoo is “Immortan Joe” from the new Mad Max movie.