Monday 3 May 2010

Caffeine tattoo commission for Scicurious

A few months back, blogger Scicurious of Neurotopia asked me about designing a tattoo to celebrate her PhD. Sci was specific on the subject matter: caffeine! She knew she wanted something one-of-a-kind, black-line, and possibly tribal.

Most of the commissions I've ever had have been through people online as opposed to people in my own community. While this is the first pseudonym-anonymous blogger I've worked for, I wasn't concerned. Besides the fact we've met in person, you can tell a lot of things about bloggers from their writing, and the way they're held in the blogging community. I expected this commission to be a lot of fun - and it was.

The designs went through a lot of versions. Here's a look at some of them. Click to enlarge.

These are from the first few sketches. I called the top one 'droplets' and the bottom one 'scanner' : For a design like this one below, I was basically trying out a variety of lines and shapes to see if any struck a chord with Scicurious: I went for something a bit Tim Burton-esque here, and ended up with something with a hint of Celtic knotwork. I really like this type of line. But maybe for a different molecule. The development of the droplets idea. A more jewellery-like design. Playing with the bonds and chemicals. On many of these, I had the chemical diagrams a bit off, but Sci knows her stuff, and made revisions easy. Droplets develops more. Sci asks for the nitrogens to resemble "n's" since there's a hint of an "o" in the oxygens. The nitrogens were tough to pin down! To make sure we weren't missing something from an earlier iteration, I sent Scicurious this batch of nitrogen designs, with some new ones on the right. By this point, we'd pretty much pinned down the rest of the tattoo, and I'd switched from pencil to Photoshop to make the swapping of the nitrogens easier. The doodles on the left are done with my Intuos 3 tablet in Photoshop. I was feeling stuck, and the loose drawings helped me get back into the design. Just throwing things at it, to see what worked. I sent the image to Sci and whaddaya know? She loved one of the doodles! And here's the final! Congratulations on your PhD, Dr. Scicurious! And thanks for a terrific collaboration-commission!

(Links to the final at Scicurious's Neurotopia and Carl Zimmer's Science Tattoo Emporium.)

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Original artwork on The Flying Trilobite Copyright to Glendon Mellow
under Creative Commons Licence.

Flying Trilobite Gallery *** Flying Trilobite Reproduction Shop ***

Interested in your own one-of-a-kind science tattoo?
Send me an email at theflyingtrilobite [at] gmail [dot] com.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

WOW! As always, I really love your style, Glendon. Congratulations to both Dr. Scicurious, I am really happy for you :-) and Glendon for absolutely amazing design! You know, I am really not fond of tattoos of any sort (kinda enough pain already, why would I put up with more), but chemistry inspired one would be the top choice if I ever did. Excellent artwork!

Miriam Goldstein said...

It's so cool to see your process! Dr. Sci's tattoo is so gorgeous. Can I commission you in ~2 years for my PhD tattoo???

Marco Meredith said...

Nice work on the tatoo Glendon, what a great way to mark an acheivement!

Marco.

Glendon Mellow said...

Thanks Tatjana! The tattoo artist did an amazing job rendering the final design, so a lot of credit is due there too! And Sci's input steadily went in certain directions. We tried a lot of designs, and this looks great.

Thanks Miriam! Of course you can commission me - although in two years I plan on being famous enough to put Damien Hirst in formaldehyde and selling him for a bajillion dollars.

Thanks Marco! It came out well, didn't it? Sci marking her PhD sounds like perfect tattoo-weather to me too.

Philly Art Girl said...

That is a GREAT design! I love it!!

Glendon Mellow said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Glendon Mellow said...

It now has a fan.

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