Ram Lee Tattoo Art

Audrey Hepburn

I did the Audrey portrait on my nephew Gary while I was in Phoenix last month at Elements Tattoo – my shop away from home. Gary has a pop culture theme going on his right leg,  which is why we placed this portrait as we did. He’d found the photo a while back on the internet. The photo was washed out and I was thankful that I’ve done as many portraits as I have so that I could fill in the washed out spots with the right values.

This portrait was done in two sessions on back to back days. The first day I worked on it for six hours and focused on the hands, body and jewelry. Gary sat like a champ considering the placement of the tattoo was on his front leg, shin bone area. Ouch. I really wanted to take my time and focus on the details such as the hands and the jewelry that she is wearing. I feel that by paying close attention to these kinds of details, it really brings the tattoo to life.

The next day I went back into the tattoo and worked on the face and hair. I spent another four and a half hours on this section really focusing on the hair which took me two hours. I felt it was really important to capture the fulness and layering of how her hair was styled. The picture I worked from had no contrast to define the values in the face so this is where experience really came into play so that I could tattoo the correct values in her face. She has very defining cheekbones that I had seen in other pictures and I really wanted to capture that.

Again, Gary sat like a champ considering we tattooed him for ten and a half hours in two days on the shin bone. This was also by far one of the most challenging and rewarding portraits I’ve done so far. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do and I look forward to your input.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 11:21 am. It is filed under Black & Gray, Finished Work, Ink, Portraits, Realism, Sessions, Tattoo Art, Tattoos, Travels, Videos and tagged with Appointments, Arizona, Audrey Hepburn, Elements Tattoo, Email, Experience, Facebook, Gary, Phoenix, Pop Culture, Portrait, Tattoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.