March 14, 2024

larch needles newsletter is back!

PROLOGUE

Hello everyone! It's been a while. If you recently signed up for this newsletter, welcome! Otherwise, thank you for sticking around! As I'm writing this, spring has arrived in all its glory. At least where I am, we're in this very brief and special part of the season in which the first wave of new growth is breaking. The forest is mostly bare, still, but up in the canopy you can sea a foam of red and yellow blossoms, in the upper branches of the maple and elm trees. The alders have produced long, fluorescent catkins seemingly overnight. The vernal pools are loud with a clangorous orgy of frog songs.

All in all, it seems like the perfect time to be reviving some old habits, and to introduce some new elements to my practice. The shifting winds of economy and social media have created a near-universal dry season in the tattoo world, which a lot of people (myself included) have been feeling pretty hard. As much as I'd like to just hermit myself away and work on art, while , I'm realizing that I need to improve my hustle if I'm going to weather the storm. It seems like video content is the way to go these days, so I'm trying to adapt. While I'm not thrilled about trying to make little micro-videos of tattoos that could be otherwise well-documented with still photographs, I am excited about making videos of my drawing / painting / designing process.

And of course, as social media gets more and more unreliable, having a newsletter like this is a crucial line of communication! So thank you again for being here.

BOOKING

My books are currently open for March and April. Here are the dates I have available right now.

Tuesdays: 4/2, 4/9, 4/16, 4/23, 4/30

Wednesdays: 4/3, 4/10, 4/17, 4/24

Fridays: 3/22, 4/5, 4/12, 4/19, 4/26

Saturdays: 4/6, 4/20, 4/27

You can find my booking form here, along with all the relevant info!

NEW FLASH

While virtually all of my flash designs are composed and finalized digitally, I always start with physical work on paper. I enjoy the flexibility of working in a digital space, but I find that I end up making much less interesting forms if I draw directly into Photoshop. Instead, I'll make "design fragments" on paper, then scan them and assembled them in different ways. If you look closely through my flash, you can find all the repeated "fragments" that show up in different designs. Lately, I've been using watercolor as a starting point rather than pen and ink, which I'm really enjoying. Brushstrokes already have so much built in dynamism, which leads me to create entirely different shapes than I would if I was precisely outlining everything with a pen. These designs above are just a small sample of the recent additions to my flash library, which can be viewed in its entirety here!

MAKING A HYBRID PIECE

I tend to do a lot of projects that involve significant modifications to my flash designs, or combinations of multiple designs to create something new. I thought it might be cool to shed a little light on how this process played out for a recent project!

These are the two designs my client wanted to combine. They also described the approximate placement they were going for - draped over the shoulder, with a long "tail" reaching up the back of the neck.

I started by putting the two designs together in Photoshop, cutting and rearranging until I found something that felt balanced and appropriate in size/shape for the intended placement. I knew that the long tail was going to be done freehand, so I didn't worry too much about that part of the composition.

Because designs were from different families, I wanted to redraw one of them so they could blend together seamlessly. My client was happy with this idea. I started by tracing over the lighter design, and making some slight adjustments along the seam between the two.

I then drew over the initial tracing, trying my best to match the fluid line quality of the other design. One of the distinctive features of that design is that there are no branches or intersections - each piece could be unfurled into a straight line. I decided to add some breaks in the translated design to remove all the intersections, which helped the overall piece read as a cohesive whole.

And here's the final result! Couldn't be happier with how this turned out.

EPILOGUE

As you may know, I've had this newsletter going for a while, albeit quite inconsistently. I think a big reason why I've found it hard to keep the habit going is the lack of feedback. For all its faults, one nice thing about social media is the constant drip feed of affirmation via likes and comments. It shows creators that people are actually looking at what they do and appreciating it. With the newsletter, though, it often felt like I was spending hours working on something just to pitch it into the void. But I have an idea! You can reply to this newsletter just as you would any other email. I've also enabled comments on this newsletter, which I only just learned is a thing, and I'm not entirely quite how it works. If you feel moved to, I would love it if folks could reply to this with a picture and/or description of something interesting they experienced outdoors - a cool piece of moss, baby green buds on a tree branch, an especially weird looking sidewalk crack, anything! I think it will help me a lot to get a feedback loop going here, and I'm also just genuinely curious about what things catch your attention out in the world.

Thank you so much for reading! Until next time.

-eva