Cody Deegan
I bought a new guitar a couple weeks ago, and it arrived today. It’s beautiful and amazing. The last time I bought a guitar was 15 years ago – my Prestige RG1570 which I still play all the time. Now I have a J.Custom RG8570Z. It’s so pretty that I haven’t even taken it out of the case and played it yet.
While I was waiting for the guitar to ship, I built a pedal board for my guitar pedals. I didn’t feel like spending any more money to buy one so I designed and built it pretty cheap.
I found a little bit of motivation to work on an unfinished painting recently. I still didn’t finish it but I got her skin tones layered and smoothed out. I still need to work on her hair, hands, dress, and the flower.
If you remember from my last post, I had just turned my son’s bedroom into a music recording area for live performance. Well since then, he decided to come back home to Nevada from North Carolina. He made the drive in 3 days all by himself. So I gave him his room back. The live recording room will have to wait for now. It’s good to have him home again.
I am no longer teaching for the Master Tattoo Institute. Although I enjoyed my time there, I am glad I can focus on just tattooing for now. I recently made a new tattoo video for my YouTube channel which was actually a result of helping one of my students before my last class. I was demonstrating the process of simplifying gray values to prepare for a black and gray realism tattoo. The idea is to redraw a photo but only use 5 values.
I had to design a new tattoo for a client and I ended up using the same process for her artwork.
Alright well let’s look at some of the tattoos I worked on since my last post:
I added a bighorn skull to an in-progress sleeve, and I started two creepy horned snakes on a dude’s neck – ewww!
I added the crucifixion scene to the inside arm of the lion tattoo that’s been ongoing, and I started a rose underneath the lion. This one should shape up to be a nice half-sleeve.
More in-progress tattoos – adding vines and clockwork gears, starting a new sailing ship, and working on the underwater leg sleeve.
I did finally finish this colorful floral piece. She had me add some quotes her children had written her, and I did those in their handwriting.
I will finish today’s post with the most difficult style of tattoo that I do – the infamous color portrait. I cranked this one out this morning in 4 hours. It’s Paul Newman in a scene from the movie “Cool Hand Luke”. We didn’t get completely finished, but I will tidy it up next session and then start filling all the blank areas between all the portraits.