Skin & Bone is a combination gallery and tattoo studio. The gallery will exhibit art and ethnographic handicrafts related to tattooing, while the studio will have Colin Dale tattooing alongside various guest artists throughout the year. Through his years of travelling and tattooing around the world Colin has had the pleasure to meet and work alongside a wide range of tattoo artists and experts working in ethnographic and other specialized styles. Amongst these friends, we have hand-tattooists from Borneo, Polynesia and Japan as well as some of the world's leading artists in Blackwork and Dotwork coming to visit. Check the homepage http://www.skinandbone.dk/ to see some of the work



Monday, 13 April 2015

Artistic Process: What I do between flights


Been travelling so much the last few months that I haven't even set my hands on a tattoo machine. But here are a few things I've been doing between flights

Enjoy! 


I've been attending the Florence Tattoo Convention for several years now and they have always tried to promote and highlight the traditions of cultural tattooing. It was for this reason that I was honoured when they asked me if I could design something for their 2015 poster. I had been inspired by by trip to La Specola (museum of Zoology and Natural History) when last in Florence and have always loved the work of Leonardo who was trained in Florence. I've always been more drawn to his illustrations than paintings and thus used his Vitruvian Man as inspiration for this piece which I call Vitruvian Thor
You can see more here:

Unfortunately my figure was rather large on the page so they had to cut it down to make more room for text and sponsers in the border. Aside from being a painter, inventor and medical illustrator Leonardo was also an astronomer. Thus Vitruvian Thor was placed on a background of constellations using line drawings from some of my previous tattoos. 
This is not the final poster... however it is coming along

Continued on JD from Holland with his "Blood Gods" torso project
One more visit and we should be finished

Old School... Skull and Serpent
I want to do more skulls :-)

 Got to try out my new long throw coil machine by Bealze Bub which I got for my birthday. And finally got to use some new 18 hollow point shader needles which I got as gift from Alvin at Ion Needles. The grouping doesn't fit any traditional tubes, but I found that it did fit my old open wash shader tubes made by Tattoo Sven from Nyhavn back in the day. 

 Double Headed Rune Dragon this client's first tattoo. Nice thick lines and lots of dots courtesy of Uncle Roy rotaries

 Just as the early sailors would get tattooed with Polynesian designs when they visited the islands so too would the natives get more illustrative designs. The palm tree tattoo could be argued to be neo-traditional and examples are recorded from before the electric tattoo machine came into use. 
A cultural exchange of sorts :-)

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