Vinyl Tattoo Concepts

I am designing a two tone design to be cut out of vinyl that are tattoo reminiscent in nature in that they need to have personal meaning.  I had many more sketches that I scrapped mid drawings so these are the ones that I ended up with and from these I chose ten to do a vinyl-esq cleaned up sketch.

The Ten I Went With:

1. Teeth

I have always loved dragon different teeth designs for monster and creatures, but I have received a fair amount of compliments over the years for how I illustrate them.  They have become a bit of a proud point in my artworks and I've even had people tell me they've learned how to draw better teeth from mine.  It's been a huge ego booster that way and one thing that I am really proud of.  I have since taken extra care to study and properly draw it.  It's one thing that people say they associate me with.

2. Misty Skull

The misty skull combines many things that I love.  I love mystery, and I love skeletons, and monsters as well.  The inspiration came from a resin cat skull I own sitting off to the side in a similar position to this skull and I decided to kind of flesh it out with a more sinister tone to it.

3. Cat

My cat giving me snuggles when drawing made this happen.  This may seem pretty straightforward but I genuinely adore cats.  My cat has helped me through so much and they are honestly my favourite animals.  I will never not have a cat.  I've become so used to having one that I can't live without one now.  I also greatly relate to cats in many ways, I like sleep, I like food and I like spending time around people, but also being independent.

4. Eldritch Monster

The inspiration for drawing this particular character came from a chat with a friend where they mentioned her, and I figured, since she's a fairly recently made character, she represents my current aesthetic preferences fairly well.  This character is a design of monster that I have grown fond of, she initially started as a doodle and I have since grown attached to her.  I've drawn her many times since then.  She's an example of the characters I love to create and one big reason of why I am going to art school in the first place.  Art is everything to me and creating characters is one of my favourite things about art.  I would be very much amiss without it.

5. Bat

The inspiration for the bat was my one friend from high-school who likes bats a lot.  The bat for me kinda symbolizes rekindling old friendships and getting closer, because in high-school we were friends but not super close, but after high-school we reconnected and he's one of my closest friends now.  It's... a hopeful animal for me.  I see it and feel a certain optimism about the future.

6. Clawed Hands

I was looking at my own hand when this idea came to mind.  Claws are like teeth but are what I used to be more well known for.  People sometimes would ask me how to draw them and for advice, I still get asked and I'm working on drawing them accurately, along with hands.  So combining hands and claws seemed like a solid choice.  Along with that, the fusion of more animal and human elements is autobiographical in that I love combining and messing with anatomy in a potentially plausible fashion.

7. Pumpkin Patch Monster

This one is more of a fun one, as mentioned before I love dragon/monsters, and I was born in October so this combination happened.  I find that it works along well with the associations we make, such as seeing shapes in clouds, I love finding the shapes in the world around me and making creations from those shapes.  

8. Noodles

So the inspiration for these came from a mixture of talking about mac and cheese, my favourite food, and a running joke with my family that got passed on to other friends.  It started from an episode of Brooklyn 99 where a guy calls blueberries: Blewbs.   And then our family began shortening other stuff eventually turning to noodles and changing it to: Noodz.  And then I joked with my one friend about showing hot noodz and before I could get a response, sent them the sketch of macaroni noodles. Now it is a running joke among some chat servers I am a part of.  As for how it represents me?  Well... it shows how stupid my humour is sometimes.

9. Monster Face

I was inspired by a spider and sort of explored from there!  The squares paired with the regular elements of a monster is intended to show the importance of mixing the rigid rules with a certain fluidity.  The best monsters are ones that play with what goes together while still relying on the physical to make it feel alive.  

10. Broken Dragon

This was fun to play with more complex shapes and trying to make it work with two tones.  It was inspired by a character I created almost 5 years ago but I decided to take it further and play with a more armoured, ghostly look.  I have lately taken to playing with less natural shapes and am excited to learn more down this avenue representing for me, the learning I still have to do.

A Castle A Day Keeps the Dragon at Bay

I've had a lot of fun creating this castle! I've looked up various other castle designs and have tried my hand at creating my own unique castle... with a dragon of course you cannot have one without the other.  It has been a bit since I have last used Rhino so this was a really helpful way to jump back in and remember all of the tools.

I frequently used Boolean Difference, Split, and at the very end I added it all together with Boolean Union.  I primarily used square shapes but I also made a rounded top for some windows and doors. For the dragon I created each part on the ground with the line tool and drew each part, than rotated it to the appropriate angles before joining them all.  

It all went pretty smoothly all in all!  I found great success in reusing pre-existing shapes to add more detail and save time doing it as well as adding more depth to windows and doorways to make it look more detailed.