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For years, Nemecio “Nemo” Lopez approached portrait drawing the way any tattoo artist would: line for line.
And then his teacher showed the 25-year-old Sylmar man how a real artist breaks it down into stages.
“It’s like he was sculpting a face, giving it dimension and life; all that good stuff,” said Lopez, who put the lesson to his realistic black-and-gray tattoo work at Needle Pushers in Van Nuys and got surprising results.
“Now I’m knocking down a portrait faster than before, and it doesn’t look flat,” he said.
Call it a lesson learned.
A growing number of established tattoo artists like Lopez are sharpening their skills and increasing their marketability at fine art schools, and for good reason. The tattoo, once relegated to the gritty side of the street, has transcended its clichéd past in recent years much in the way like graffiti has.
“It’s no longer fringe and ghetto,” said Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, a professor at Otis College of Art and Design, where a number of his students are tattoo artists and former street taggers pursuing fine art careers. “It’s made the leap to becoming mainstream and fashion.”
Consider Ed Hardy’s colorful tattoo imagery of skulls, tigers and geishas on everything from T-shirts to blow dryers and lunch boxes. Kat Von D, star of TLC’s “LA Ink,” has launched a line of cosmetics at Sephora and written three New York Times best sellers — “High Voltage Tattoos,” “The Tattoo Chronicles” and “Go Big or Go Home.” More recently, Oxygen’s popular tattoo competition series “Best Ink” returned for a third season with colorful characters all vying for $100,000 and a cover story in Tattoo magazine.
What’s more, PTA moms to doctors are paying top dollar to go under the needle.
“The money is there in an incredible way,” said Sergio Sanchez, a tattoo artist and fine art painter who teaches at different art schools around town. “People will let go of $3,000 or $4,000 no problem, but if you try to get the same individual to buy an original oil painting for the same amount, it isn’t happening.”
The challenge is standing out from the crowd.
To step it up a notch, tattoo artists are taking the money they earn on clients and applying it to learning the fundamentals of shape, value, edge and color.
“The fundamentals are the only things that you can control to re-create an image no matter what style you work in,” said Sanchez, who has seen an influx of tattoo artists pass through his classes on any given day at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art in Van Nuys, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. and Laguna College of Art and Design in Laguna Beach, Calif.
Some tattoo artists enroll in single-session classes to become better at drawing, while others like Camila Rocha set out to make the transition to fine art.
Rocha, 31, got her start in Sao Paolo, Brazil, 13 years ago as the first female tattoo artist there. But she always dreamed of becoming an artist.
When she got to Los Angeles, she enrolled in an arts program through LAAFA and studied with different artists on the side while working for Kat Von D’s High Voltage Tattoo shop in West Hollywood, Calif. (where “LA Ink” is filmed). She’s now at the New York Academy of Art pursuing her master’s in painting and drawing with the goal of teaching and leaving tattoo art behind.
“Tattooing is a giving experience as an artist, but I always felt there was a part of me that wanted to be more expressive, and tattooing was not fulfilling that professionally,” said Rocha, whose tattoo style has gone from old school imagery to Japanese mythology. “As soon as I went to become a fine artist and I was in that environment, and I was expressing myself and I was finding myself, I knew it was the right choice.”
The irony is some of her classmates are following the opposite trajectory and entering the world of tattoos after art school.
“Tattooing is about grabbing an image, tracing it to the best of your ability and putting it on skin,” said Edgar Marquez, the 35-year-old co-owner of Long Beach Ink Assassins and tattoo artist. “There are some hard-core tattoo artists who want to stick with it, but then there are other tattooers who are pushing it to another level because they know what fine art is.”
Although he doesn’t have a lot of free time on his hands, Marquez, who tattoos to support his family of six — including his two children, ages 4 and 9, and his wife’s twin 13-year-old brothers — has been picking up art classes here and there for several years.
More recently he studied with figurative artist Sean Cheetham at 3Kicks Art Studio in Pasadena and creates classical-style paintings of luchadores and other cultural references to his Mexican-American upbringing. His paintings are a separate expression from his colorful tattoo work, which ranges from realistic to cartoon-y.
But that’s not the way Shay Bredimus sees it.
The 34-year-old consciously lets them influence one another.
“Some people come in to see me specifically because I have an art background and they want a painterly style of tattoo,” said Bredimus, who is a tattoo artist at the influential Outer Limits in Long Beach (formerly Bert Grimm’s World Famous Tattoo Shop now owned by Kari Barba) and classically trained fine art painter with a master’s in fine arts represented by the Koplin Del Rio gallery in Culver City, Calif.
Tattoo artists usually transfer the design to skin and fill in the lines dark to light. With the painterly style, Bredimus starts at the bottom left corner of his design and works his way to the top, “brushing in” color with the needle and tightening up the composition as he goes along.
He adds pattern and layers pigment on pigment over the course of several sessions, allowing the skin to heal between ink saturations.
“Everything gets deeper and darker and smoother,” he said. “You can really see the difference.
The surgical precision of tattooing is likewise translated in his studio work.
Bredimus is currently putting together a show called “Seni Horoscope,” a re-creation of 17th century astrology cards created by Giovanni Battista Seni — an Italian oracle who served Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein, a major figure in the Thirty Years’ War.
In creating the cards, he uses tattoo ink and wax crayon on drafting film.
Jewelry maker Diana Ishimizu Erskin of Long Beach recently hired Bredimus to design a mythological “mermaid princess,” wrapped in octopus tentacle hair. It’s her first tattoo by the artist whom she sought out because of his technical precision combined with a fine arts background, though it’s her fifth overall inspired by ocean and nature.
“His pieces are intricate and well thought out and highly designed, which I find somebody with a degree would have more ability to achieve than somebody who hasn’t gone to art school,” says Erskin, 30, who has spent upwards of $2,000 total on skin art by different tattoo artists in the last six years.
They include a “mom”-style heart tattoo with the name of her 3-year-old daughter, Amelia, emblazoned on a banner filling the upper half of her right arm. Also for her daughter: a small dreamcatcher to ward off evil spirits. Her maiden surname, Ishimuzu, is tattooed on her back for her grandmother — “She was my favorite person in the world,” Erskin says — accompanied by a sea turtle and birds. They share her back with a starfish, her first tattoo.
“I would pay more for a tattoo than I would for something for my wall just because it’s on my body,” Erskin says. “It’s something that you have to look at every day so you better sure it’s what you want.”
