Evil Twins Tattoo

Skull and Sakura by Johan of Evil Twins Tattoo

I am loving this style of Black & Grey with a hint of color. This Swedish tattoo shop is filled with some amazing talent, check out their portfolio of work! So beautiful!



I am in awe! *bows down* hahaa.

Valentine's Day cards

Sweet Cupcake

Part of my February design goals was to design a series of Valentine's Day themed cards. I went into a wonderful paper/card store the other day and looked at their Valentine's cards and they were all cheesy and in the same shade of red and pink D: When I first started to put these together the color scheme was no where near pink or red, they started out blue and black actually lol. But my new favorite and indispensible part of Adobe Illustrator CS3 is the color guide function. It makes picking your color schemes much easier, basically you just select a color and go to the color guide and it lists all that color's complements, analogs, compounds, etc. Best thing they ever added to that program in my opinion because color schemes are kind of difficult for me.

This cupcake design was inspired by a tattoo trend, usually when people think of tattoos they think of really scary things like skulls and what not. But a lot of girls love getting cupcake tattoos as evidence by this large gallery on flickr. The first time I ever saw one was in Inked magazine when they had a feature on Twinkie Chan.

It was a fun design to do and I love the color scheme, it complements the things that are illustrated and makes me think of yummy sweets and chocolate, although getting the right shape for the top of the cupcake took some time D:




I also wanted to do a design for men, when I sat down to think about what kind of tattoo inspired designs would be appropriate for men I realized that men get a lot of motifs and designs that are usually associated with women outside of the tattoo world. Whether that be roses or cherry blossoms in American style tattoo or Japanese traditional style. I bought Kat Von D's book which I will post more about later and I wanted to do some black & grey inspired roses along with this pistol design I originally made for a screenprint.
The trick was recreating a textured version in Illustrator, I really like how this design turned out, there's another version that says Death Before Dishonor, a Sailor Jerry reference and I thought it seemed appropriate given the content of the drawing.

Overall my goal was to create some designs that weren't totally conventional and that could also be used for any occasion just not the big hallmark holiday. Valentine's is a weird holiday, it creates really odd expectations on the part of men and women. Women are taught to expect roses, candy and jewelry and men are taught that that's what all women want and that's what they need to give them in order to make them happy on this day.
Frankly I find the whole roses and candy think corny and unoriginal, because its not like that guy put a lot of thought into buying those things right? Also there's that whole other underbelly of it where women are expected to give sex in return for the man's investment in $85 bouquet of roses and jewelry. LOL, in the end it ends up being really unromantic and just a headache for both parties involved.

I hope you all have a great Valentine's day be it with your friends or significant other.

Cherry Blossom Girl

World of Whimsy

I was reading the latest issue of Bust magazine and they had a write up about this French fashionista blog called The Cherry Blossom Girl. Its curated by this young woman called Alix, she has a really great sense of style and accentuates her outfits by photographing on locations to add an air of whimsy. She has a great eye for color and and gorgeous Chloe shoes. I love the mood she creates with each photo session, it lends a less superficial air to fashion and shows her passion.

The best part is that quite a few of her outfits are from stores like Zara and H&M, so they're not completely inaccessible to her readers. But unfortunately not all of us can afford fabulous shoes like these Chloe ones!



Check out her blog if you need some inspiration or to get lost in a whimsical world of fantasy.

Koi Red

Koi Red by ~bakrsa on deviantART

Design goals update
I - 3 Birthday Cards
II - 1 Blog banner
III - 1 Koi Spring illustration
IV - 1 Deer Spring illustration
V - 1 Thank you card

Wahhhh this took a long time to do because of all the detail in the fish scales but I love how it turned out. It looks like a more fleshed out version of the previous Koi illustration I did. I might go back and rework that one.

This piece started out from a sketch I did back in December that was inspired by the work of legendary Japanese tattoo artist Horiyoshi III. I really admire all the detail in his work and I find it inspirational since its only recently that I've started to include more detailing in my work. Its time consuming but the end result is worth it.

I'm obsessed with Koi tattoos but I'm excited to get to work on the Deer illustration. The way how I envision it in my mind isn't necessarily spring themed, it might end up with the same color scheme as the piece in my blog banner, but the composition I have in mind was inspired by a panel in a Batman graphic novel. I need to go buy it because the artwork in it is truly amazing.

Steal

via swissmiss

As a designer it took me a long time to come to terms with the content of that quote because we all come out of college thinking we're going to design the next big thing that NO ONE has ever seen before. In reality when you look around at a lot of commercial graphic design, what you see is a derivative from some other style or its coasting on the trendy style of the moment.

I think as designers we look at the world through a different lens and overanalyze most of what we see, but the average joe is going to gravitate to a design and style that they like and something they connect with on some emotional or superficial level.
As a consumer I gravitate to Japanese inspired motifs or tattoo inspired prints and I'm not alone in that, that's why so many designers use that style because they know it sells and people like it.

Eventually I just realized that you don't have to try to be the most original designer, you just have to design things that people connect with.

I think that's why I got so attracted to tattoo art, there's no pretending in trying to be original, as a tattoo artist you just try to excel at whatever style you like, be it Japanese, Black & Grey or ultra realistic, among others. No one is trying to reinvent Japanese waves and shading techniques you know?

To me the important thing is to become really great at what you do regardless of where the inspiration comes from, because at this point its hard to be truly original, everything is derivative and that's ok.

Design Goals: January

I - 3 Birthday Cards
II - 1 Blog banner
III - 1 Koi Spring illustration
IV - 1 Deer Spring illustration
V - 1 Thank you card

Yey goals! I think this will be a good way to get myself designing the elements that I need in order to have enough sample stationary cards to mail out to companies who make cool stationary in the style I like. And also in order to build the collection of work to display in a coffee shop.

Currently working on birthday card #1! Its about 90% done. Three people I know are having birthdays in the coming weeks so its for them and for my portfolio :D

I have three weeks to complete these goals! I shall post the results as I finish.

What I do

Koi Snow by ~bakrsa on deviantART

As I said on my profile I'm currently an unemployed Graphic Designer, I started doing vector illustration about 2 years ago I think and since I first started my work has evolved and become more complex, detailed and whimsical. I use Adobe Illustrator to do all my illustrations, some start from sketches and others start directly on the computer screen.

In college I only ever had ONE course in Illustrator and even then I wasn't taught exactly how to draw in it, it was more of a typography class ... I'm not sure why we didn't have a course in Quark if they meant to teach us typography but whatever LOL. I think back then InDesign didn't even exist but I digress. I learned more about Illustrator when I did an internship in college and did really bad drawings in it, but I've come a long way since.


Koi Girl Tattoo by ~bakrsa on deviantART

These days my main inspiration is Japanese Tattoo style, in the past I used to look at a lot of other graphic designers and illustrators for inspiration, but their work seemed to run together and everyone was doing that cutesy style or the graffiti influenced style and I didn't find that particularly interesting after a while.

Tattoo imagery has always fascinated me and I like the centuries, decades and years of tradition behind the different styles. I find it a bit more pure and not driven by trends as most contemporary illustration seems to be.

The koi fish and black motion lines in the Koi Snow piece were actually hand drawn at first and then scanned it and redrawn in illustrator with the pen tool. The thing I like about studying Japanese tattoo style is that it forces you to actually drawn on a page and learn to be a good hand drawn illustrator and not just one on the screen.

Currently I'm working towards putting together a minimum of 10 stationary designs and another 2 koi themed illustrations. I eventually want to have a theme of illustrations that I can take to coffee shops and see if they would like to display them on their walls. Its a great way to get exposure because you never know who is walking into these coffee shops. Hopefully someone who can offer me a job LOL!

You can see more of my work on my professional online portfolio: http://coroflot.com/bakrsa