Shouldercap tattoo in Samoan Maori patterns

Hi,

I have been quite busy the last few months with a lot of different projects, with little time to write posts on my blog.
But to show you some new projects I've been working on; here's a new tattoo for my shoulder galleries. It's a mixed design with Maori elements and Samoan pattern. The images below show the design process in different steps. First I make a basic outline for the shoulder as a template. Then I use my pencil to sketch some flowing koru shapes. Normally I do the whole piece with pencil first and start tracing it when I'm finished.
Today I was a bit impatient, and decided to trace parts of the tribal shapes. You see some Polynesian turtle patterns and Samoan spearheads and stylized fish.

Here you see half of the design traced with a black felt tip marker:

And a few pictures of the finished shoulder tattoo design

I also made a youtube movie of this Shoulder tattoo 156:

The tattoo is available for purchase on my website here.

Tomorrow I will be back with another design process!

Regards, Mark

from: Joey L. 

to: tiangotlost@gmail.com 

date: Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 3:22 PM 

subject: Lost in translation 

Can you please translate. 

Not another “gibberish tattoo”!

Obviously it’s supposed to be JOEY from the handy-dandy cheat sheet to the bogus gibberish font.

from: Alan Siegrist
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 11:52 PM
subject: Woman tree

Hi Tian, Hope you are still enjoying Austria.

Have you seen this tattoo?

The character is actually the Japanese katakana ホ (ho) not 木 (ki, tree). The mistaken use of ‘ho’ is quite unfortunate considering the woman as both subject and canvas. And yes, the hip-hop slang meaning of ‘ho’ (whore) is known in Japan and written with the same character.


http://www.ratemyink.com/?action=ssp&pid=103667

Back in 2005, I saw a photo in Flickr titled "Cindy, a beautiful canvas."

Fast forward to 2012, Dr. Victor Mair met the young lady in person:

So I asked Cindy what she thought the tattooed symbols running down her neck and spine meant. She replied:

The bottom two were supposed to be success… then respect.

Oh well. Works either way. It is what it is. You can put whatever name you want.

Queen OF The World is what I prefer.

I followed up by asking Cindy what she thought the second, very unusual, symbol meant. She said, "Oh, that's just a cross for Jesus."

Tentatively, this is what I had to work with:

1. mǔ 母 ("mother")

2. zǐ 子 ("child"), or perhaps some kind of cross

3. wù 物 ("thing, object")

4. guì 贵 ("precious; expensive")

With considerable effort, I could get that to mean "Mother and child are precious things." But I was not satisfied with this interpretation, both because of my uncertainty over the second symbol and because it required me to accept a strained interpretation of the final two characters.

(Continue reading at Language Log)

Pencil sketch of a Mauri-style shoulder tatou

Hi,

I get a lot of requests for custom tattoo designs, unfortunately it's impossible to do them all, but here's a nice tatoo project I'm working on at the moment.

My customer asked me to do a tattoo sketch for the shoulder and up to the back/neck. He wanted to see some original eagle designs with claws and wings in a tribal style. The big central curve at consists of two tribal claws of the eagle and at the bottom of the tattoo I made some realistic feathers that would flow onto his biceps and upper arm.

Here's the first pencil sketch I did:

The feathers needed some adjustments to run on the biceps correctly. I also made them more abstract to go better with the overall design:

I'm waiting for my customers response, so I can finish the pencil drawing and start on the final high quality piece.

If you're interested in my designs, you can follow me on twitter, facebook or check out my channel at youtube, simply hit the buttons at the upper right of this page.

Any questions? Please send me a message!

Mark

Create a Maori knife design for CNCone cutting

Hi!

This time a different project, no tattoos, but a design for a knife. It's not a normal knife for cutting your meat, but more a kind of artistic/decorative design. The final piece will be cut by a friend, who is using CNCOne at work. He needs a special kind of file format, a .dxf file.

This means that I need to use Adobe Illustrator to export the linedrawing of the knife, so he can import it into CNCone, a CAD/CAM software program, used to instruct a carving machine to make objects from all kinds of metal, wood and plastics.

For more information on CNCone, you can visit a blog called CNCzone.com

Well, first I started of with a pencil sketch and scanned it. Placed the file in Adobe Illustrator and used the pen tool to trace the image. Here's a picture of the first knife I designed:

Then I used the 3d filter to add some depth:

The file was exported as a .dxf file so my friend could use it CNCone, but there was a problem with the design, especially the inner parts. 

The spindle that carves out the metal is round with a minimim diameter of 4 mm, so it can not carve all the sharp edges of the design. The outer shape was not a problem fortunately.

So I had to adjust the knife design, back to the drawing table....

I made another sketch, and used some other patterns inside the knife/blade. You can see that only half the patterns are drawn, it's simply a matter of mirroring the design and voilá!

Exported the linedrawing and to test the .dxf file I opened it in Rhinoceros 3D. 

To show you the full process from sketch to a ready-to-carve file I recorded a video:

When the final design is carved by a CNC machine, I will post some pictures or a small video.

Any questions? Just let me know.

Kind regards, Mark Storm

Shoulder tattoo design in Maori style

Hi,

Recently I created two new tattoo designs for my webshop. The first tattoo is a Kirituhi Maori style shoulder design. All my tattoos are hand-drawn on A3 paper with a B2 pencil. First I sketch the basic shape of the shoulder and upper arm and then add some koru (fern) curves that flow nicely through the design. Once I'm satisfied with the overall look, I start filling in the patterns between the korus with triangles, lines, spearheads and other repetitive shapes. Below are a few pictures of the tattoo design in progress

For my Youtube channel I created a special video, so you can see the total design from start to finish:

The final high resolution is available on my website, but can also be purchased here on my blog. Once I receive your payment, you will get 2 high quality .jpg files. The first one is the full design including gradients, the second is the linedrawing or stencil for your tattoo artist, so he can easily transfer the outlines of the design to your skin with thermal paper.

Shoulder tattoo 150

Size: 30 x 30 cm (12 x 12 inches)

Price: 41,65 euro (57 USD)

If you have a question regarding this tattoo or other designs, just let me know or visit www.storm3d.com for all high resolution tattoos.

Kind regards, Mark Storm
info@storm3d.com