Draconaei’s Blog

Yet again I’ve had the good fortune of a tattoo design request!  How I love the satisfaction that comes from creating something beautiful and sharing it with others.  This story begins with the doodle on the left.

Rotated 90 degrees, this symbol contains the letters J, F, and O, three letters my friend’s name.  Initially used as a form of signature, he discovered that turning the form on its side somewhat resembled a winged stick figure.  He was fascinated with its tattoo potential, but had no luck graphically translating the idea; here my process begins.

I spun the design in two separate directions.  The first, seen on the left: a unique symbol that somewhat resembles an ancient script, the meaning of which would remain cryptic except to my friend.  He began his request with the intention of ending with a personal symbol along these lines.

The second design, seen on the right: a winged creature maintaining the general shape of the doodle, but given a breath of life (and some artistic liberty.)  His original tattoo fascination was sparked by the doodle’s semblance to a winged stick figure, so this direction also seemed appropriate.

After an exchange of emails, he favored the second direction.  The “shaded” style seemed a bit too basic to me, so I made an effort to add detail and speak a graphic language that better matched the dragon’s general form.  After many iterations, I settled on a broken geometry with implied lines to help to bring out the sharp but feather-like quality of the wings and the sharp quality of the tail, and triangular-like cutouts that bring a serpentine belly to mind.  To keep with the initial simplicity of the original doodle, I kept the design to a basic black-and-white format.  See the final chosen design here:

He plans to get inked quite soon, and I look forward to seeing and posting photographs once he does!

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