So here is the story about my client. I started this project on August 26th. She wanted the skeleton hand with a rose and lily so I spent from that date till September 16th drawing this. With minimal contact from my client. It took about 3-5 days for her to respond to any of my emails. Than she went ghost for about 9 days until the tattoo appointment day came up and she said she hadn’t forgotten about the appointment and couldn’t wait to come and get it done. She never ended up sending a down deposit and only paid half the tattoo price for now. We planned for her to be here at 8:00 pm after I had just worked a full 12 hour day shift at my full time job as a care aide in a psychiatric hospital ( so extremely busy day). She ended up being an hour and a half late, and then decided to inform me that she wanted something completely different from what I had drawn up. So we ended up doing the stars and moons as the final design. I started tattooing her around 12 last night. It was a 2.5 hour tattoo so it wasn’t horrible but I didn’t get to bed until 5 am this morning. But the final tattoo turned out great and it’s a beautiful piece. There is a lot I learned from this so thats a bonus, but for my first “real” client it was quite the experience lol. And I hope not every client is this much of a struggle…. I know it’ll get better but being an artist that is just starting out there’s not a lot of commitment from clients and sometimes they use us and think they can get away with things. I let this one slide but that will definitely be the first and last time i tattoo her. Thanks for looking and listening to my rant!! I hope you guys are having better experiences then this one went for me lol!!

First Live call in around 45mins!

☎️ Our first live call is this Thursday!!! It's scheduled for 11am (PST). I'm hoping that in the calender section it shows in your timezone (can you check please!). I hope you can make it. If there's anything you'd like to talk about, have some questions ready. No pressure, I'm just really looking forward to getting to know you guys better while the group is still small! Also - I've added lessons to the Tattoo 101 course in the classroom section. If there's anything you guys would like included just let me know. And if you're on the call on Thursday, that would be a great time to talk about it! I'm always open to feedback as we keep adding to this community!!!

I'll be adding to a list of everything I use & how I use it in the classroom soon. There are so many useful tools available. Thanks @Karl Hubbard for asking about my stencil process. I'll upload a full tutorial soon. I've been using this ai stencil app this past year for almost all of my tattoo prep. I do check them closely though, because the ai can get important details wrong occasionally. I often redraw parts in procreate, but this still saves me a lot of time! You can create stencils, copy them & paste straight into procreate on a new layer. And they are the correct size already. This is made by tattooers, for tattooers - https://tattoostencilpro.app/

My mats and reference