ftw//tcb

I CRASH DOWN

2011-11-21T18:56:00.000-08:00

I've got some fancy archival prints on watercolor paper for sale!

11x17"

$40 shipped with care right to your door

(add $5 shipping for overseas or Canada, please)

paypal to: mattbrotka@gmail.com

Thanks!!!!

Ashly's backpiece

2011-09-14T13:34:00.000-07:00

Here are some "step by step" pictures of a backpiece I just finished on Ashly.
I wanted to take a photo of every session, but it slipped my mind after most of the appointments, so it's not quite every step.

Each session was roughly two and a half to three hours each. A few shorter, a few longer depending on our moods and schedules.

Here's what we had to work with. Since she already had some work from various tattooers, I had kind of an awkward space to work with.

She wanted to cover up the geometric shapes in the top left, but make everything else look like it belongs with what we were adding.

My first basic sketch

First day, outline done

Finally done, but I wanted to wail until the background wasn't so fresh to take good pictures.

Finished and about 2 months healed!!
The whole process took about 8 months.

Thanks, Ashly!!

a few new tattoos

2011-09-04T20:18:00.001-07:00

Justin's watertower from the Church Hill neighborhood, here in Richmond.

Sarah's panther....the picture is pretty bad since it's half healed/half fresh...but you get the idea!

Chis is a tattooer from Los Angeles that used to live here in RVA. He was in town for a visit and I managed to squeeze this lil' tattoo machine on his leg.

A whale's tale

2011-09-04T20:07:00.001-07:00

Here is a little 'in progress' step by step of a tattoo I'm doing on Raena.

Each session has taken about three hours, give or take.

I'd say we're just past the halfway point right now.

The camera adds 100 pounds

2011-08-28T10:27:00.001-07:00

My friends at Snacktruck Media made this little video for me!

Check them out at:
http://www.snacktruckmedia.com/
and
http://www.facebook.com/SNACKTRUCKmedia

Some new paintings

2011-06-06T20:29:00.000-07:00

I've decided not to continue with the "in progress" artwork and painting stuff. Every blog I see these days is doing it, so it's taken all the interesting aspects of it away, in my opinion.

So, from now on, I guess it's just more self-serving promotion.
Come get tattooed by me!! Buy artwork!!

I originally planned to paint these on wooden planks with acrylics, and I got mostly finished with two of them before realizing that they looked like total junk, so I started over with liquid acrylics on paper.

These are all hanging the entire month of June at my favorite bar and restaurant in Richmond, 821 Cafe.

-...and when i die, i want to go to hell-

roughly 22 x 37"

liquid acrylic on paper

(detail of tarot cards)

-Don't you remember every shitty thing that you've ever done?"

Roughly 23 x 37"

liquid acrylic on paper

-I crash down-

roughly 23 x 37"

liquid acrylic on paper

Roughly 18 x 25"

liquid acrylic on paper.

Totally

2011-03-22T22:37:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows me also knows that THIS is my real art.

Vulture

2011-03-22T22:34:00.000-07:00

Started this one today! Crouched vulure.......about 3 and a half hours.

Christmas in March

2011-03-21T21:18:00.001-07:00

This one has been in the works for a long time.....finally got around to starting it this Sunday!
About 2 and a half hours so far.

a few things in progress...

2011-03-21T14:18:00.001-07:00

A couple of projects currently in the works.

Sarah's Monsters

Tiffanie's peacock cover up.
Ashley's back....Lots of smoke and background left to go!(I didn't do her ribs or portrait on the upper right shoulder)

Nancy's half sleeve. Almost there! (the branch and a few of the blossoms were already there)

Aliens!

2011-03-18T19:51:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to do an Aliens themed tattoo since I first started tattooing! Jeff Srsic did the top of her arm and I had the terribly difficult task of trying to "match up" with the style he did.
3 Sessions...about 12 hours total.
I'd love to do some more tattoos like this!!!

Initial sketch....

After the first session...3 hours, or so.....

finished......half healed/half fresh....

A few new things.....

2011-03-18T19:34:00.000-07:00

I need to update more often! I have many, many things in progress at the moment, so i will be doing a huge update in a few months, as these tattoo projects get finished. I also have an artshow in June that I have been doing a lot of "in progress" photos for.

In the meantime, here are a few simpler things I have been doing, besides getting hit by cars on my scooter.

The first sketch (in greens) and line drawing for Spencer's day of the dead lady.

The end result (maybe 3 hours of tattooing)

SALVATION

2010-11-23T15:53:00.000-08:00

A HUGEHUGEHUGE "thank you" to everyone who bought a salvation print from me when I was healing my wrecked hand from my car accident in November. I really appreciate the support.

Lady Face

2010-09-13T18:03:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted anything here, so let's do it!

I drew the initial sketch while bored at the Salt Lake City convention, thinking I could use it for something in the near future.

I wanted to do something with a really heavy Mucha look to it, but without taking something directly from his work. It's about 3x5" at this point.

Then, traced the sketch for this line drawing....evening out details, changing things here and there....

Then, I blew the line drawing up to be much larger. Then tape a million pieces of paper together. (at this point, it's maybe 14x18")

Taped that crap onto the watercolor paper.

Transfered on there. You can see here that I decided to change her facial features jut a bit to look more "eastern European" or something.....also, I wasn't pleased with the rose that I drew, so I took a different approach.

After the first night of painting....maybe 3 or 4 hours in.

after about 4 or 5 more hours.....The final product! 16x20"

some drawings and tattoos.

2010-04-25T21:37:00.000-07:00

I was poking through some files earlier and found a few things that I thought might pertain to the original intent of this blog, which is showing some artistic progress kinda thing.

These are mostly old tattoos and paintings, coupled with part of my original sketches.

Virgin mary sketch

Finished stickers on candles.

If it's not right the first time, do it again!

Finished Bob Roberts worship painting.

Abby and I are comedians.

Sometimes, it takes so long to get it just right that you don't even want to do it anymore.

lettering is especially frustrating....

line drawing for the stencil.

color study...

finished, healed tattoo.

Not quite finished yet...

My first sketch for Ashley's neck tattoo.

my first couple of sketches for a commissioned painting of a wife and child.
Working on the layout here.

The first round of blacks and greys....

..and the finished painting.

Sketch.

Tat-jam.

first few ideas....

Finished work.

Not my usual style. Done for a benefit for a friend with cancer.

done in colored pencils.

bird friends.
2007, I think.

Scootering

2010-04-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

Eventually, I'll paint or draw something for this blog, and get back to the reason I started it in the first place.
Until then, here is more boring stuff about my life.

I hate driving cars, so I ride scooters instead.

I found this beer koozie in a drawer in my house.

My new ride.

I took a trip to the dmv. Look how interesting it was.

Here's a tattoo I did on Miles the other day.

Providence

2010-04-20T23:13:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I miss Providence,so I go back and make tattoos, eat good pizza and hangout with good people.
This trip, I worked with the fine folks at Providence Tattoo on Angell St.
(http://providencetattoo.com/home.html)

My second night in town, I got all nostalgic and drove around the city for hours, visiting all the old sights and stomping grounds. I started taking pictures of some of the more choice spots...but it was dark and the camera on my phone sucks, so all you get is a too-dark picture of the place that was the very worst apartment I have ever lived in.
308 Williams st. in Fox Point. Wretched are my memories of that place. You win, 308...you broke my spirit every day for the entire year of 1997 into 1998.

On a more positive note, I found a cool picture of my Grandfather, Alfred Liberte.

I drank about 3 of these a day.

Here are just a few tattoos I did that week:

Salt Lake City

2010-04-20T23:07:00.000-07:00

The weekend after Baltimore, Fred and I flew out to Salt Lake City for more tattoo action.

Everywhere you look, the view is like this.

Downtown had fancy light posts.

The fellows from Jack Brown's had delayed flights, so Mr. James Cumberland had to make due with an impromptu banner.

Batimore

2010-04-20T22:55:00.001-07:00

In February, we worked the Baltimore Tattoo Convention. Unfortunately, mother nature decided to drop about three feet of snow on us that same weekend.

While stuck in a crappy hotel for 4 days, we decided to make the best of it.

Providence and Richmond hug it out.

There were girls doing filthy things in that window with the light on.

I swear we did not throw pillows, pizza boxes, beer bottles or snowballs out of the window....nor at the plasma tv screen....

The snow was so bad, there was thunder and lightning mixed in. Thunder snow scared the crap out of me.

Those are cars on the right hand side of the photo.

Tom shows his love for Phil. Phil is pleased.

Phillip Armstrong.

2010-04-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

Way afterhours at the shop one late evening, a few of us got Phillip Armstrong tattoos.

Sarah tattoos Phillip....on Phillip.

Here's Phil tattooing me.

Here's my tattoo.

Phillip says "Crud."

I tattooed on on Sarah, as well, but the photos are no good.

A painting from Xmas

2010-03-03T20:45:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I've been really lazy lately......well, I'll call it "busy". I had a few big projects in the works, but they kinda fizzled out and now it's just going to end up as a couple of new paintings and/or a new set of flash.
I'll be posting some sketches from that soon.

Until then, here's just a few boring flicks of an in between painting....

I did a couple of smaller Xmas commission paintings. This one in particular was for a fellow that works for a cereal company....he wanted his company's characters beating the hell out of his competitor's character.

It was nice to take a break from tattoo-type imagery for a bit and try to be a little more 'loose' or whatever.

Here's my first, rough sketch. I didn't have a lot of time to finish this one, so I tried to think it out as much as possible this time, rather then spend so many hours sketching ideas and layouts in advance. I just went for it. it was actually easier to draw this goofy stuff than I had expected.

Here are my final pencils.

Mid-action photo? (you can notice a dollar bill rolled up in the base of my lamp. It has a huge dick drawn on it. I am too embarrassed to spend it.)

The finished painting....

Around Xmas and new years I had been painting and drawing my ass off, so lately, I've been a little burnt out, so I've spent my nights watching TV like a true lump and loaf.

I have enjoyed season 1 of Carnivale very much. I encourage you all to check it out if you haven't already.

Moz

2009-10-07T19:16:00.000-07:00

Sooooooooo, I have been very lazy lately and have not been painting at all. Fortunately, I keep finding old sets of pictures that I was taking when I first started thinking of this blog. I forgot all about the Morrissey painting documentation from last Christmas.

I had been telling my wife that I would paint a portrait of Morrissey for her for years. I finally got around to staring it right around Christmas time of last year.

I wanted to include a song lyric, quote or whatever along with the portrait, but couldn't decide on any particular line. My wife and I sat up late one night watching tons of Morrissey videos to give us a lead. We filled a few notebook pages with ideas and finally decided on altering a line from the song Glamorous Glue. So, it's not an actual line. If you've got a problem with that, come find me and we can punch each other until it's resolved.

Here's the reference picture I used. It's from the reissue of Southpaw Grammar. I thought is was mildly obscure, and wouldn't seem too "overused" but then he used it for all of his t-shirts and stickers for his latest tour, so that idea kinda backfired.

I kinda work out the overall idea in my head, then hit the tracing paper and red pencils. (Thankfully, I am prepared this time and have an ample amount of actual tracing paper on hand. Table paper is lame.)

The start...

I should have saved myself the time and just painted this one instead.

I wanted to add a few touches that most Morrissey fans would recognize, so I decided on gladiolas and finally some boxing gloves at the bottom almost like a pendant or something fancy like that.

I hatehatehate laying out lettering. It's a surprise to most because I tend to add lettering to everything I draw for some reason. I especially hate lettering on the kind of watercolor paper I use due to the rough tooth on the paper. Someday I'll rid myself of the lettering curse, but until then, I shall suffer.

The 16 and 18 are the number of spaces I need to keep it even. Math sucks.

At this time, I'm just off camera, banging my head into the wall in frustration and self-disappointment.

Here are my final pencils.

I get a fresh piece of watercolor paper, and lightly trace the pencils onto it.

Here's a closeup.

As with the Strummer painting, I decided to only listen to Morrissey throughout this painting. No Smiths, just the Moz. Here's proof, albeit blurry.

Here are the lines.

I messed up BIG TIME on a small detail here. Further into the game, I spent many hours trying to save the painting. It was far too painful to document. I guess you truly suffer for your art sometimes.
I would explain, but it'll give away too many technical details and I don't want to turn this into a "how to" blog. Gotta keep some of the secrets...well...secret.

Around this point in painting, an extremely drunken, uninsured lout plowed his dump of a car into my mostly new, nice-ish car while it was parked. Here's just a sample of the damage.

Drunk Guy (to Cop): "put HIM in cuffs, too!" (gestures toward me)
Cop: "Why should I arrest him?"
Drunk Guy: "He cussed me out!"

I lost a bit of steam on the painting after that night, so took a few weeks off.
Here's where I picked up again.

Mostly done with the background. The portrait part is really the only "interesting" part to paint, so I saved it for last this time. Here it is with my first coat of grey.

Flower closeup. I dropped some tan. Oops.

The finished product! 16 x 20"

Closeup of the handsome devil.

Hopefully soon I'll have some NEW projects to show.

Double Dragon

2009-10-06T19:52:00.000-07:00

No new paintings in the works at the moment, so here's a tattoo that I built today on my pal, Dustin.

London's Burning.

2009-09-23T20:21:00.001-07:00

Since I'm not currently working on anything that I've already begun documenting, I dug up some old pieces of paper and some crappy camera phone pictures from a painting that I did of Joe Strummer.
I did this painting about a year ago and it was a commission for a friend.

I decided to use this picture of Joe because of the high contrast. I figured it would be the most easily recognizable picture I could pull off with watercolors.

I always enjoyed the belief that if punk rock had a patron saint, it would be Joe Strummer, so I went for a stained glass/"Saint Joe" kinda thing.

I ran out of tracing paper, so I had to use a roll of exam table paper, which is actually terrible stuff to use in place of tracing paper. I mostly work on paintings around 2 or 3 in the morning, so I usually end up having to use whatever is at my immediate disposal.

I sketched my initial thoughts here, then got the idea to include his Fender. The problem being that the composition of the reference photo only allowed me to place is as if he were left handed. We all know that's not right, so I made the decision to flip the portrait over, so the guitar would be facing the correct way.

Of course, that meant that I had to paint the portrait backwards. Dumb idea.
In hindsight, I could have easily flipped the picture in a photo editing program, but apparently, I like to do things the hard way. This added countless hours to the painting.
(I find this approach is great when you want make people think that you possess wizard-like art skills....when, in reality, you're just lazy or too stupid to do it the easy way.)

.
So, here is the flipped sketch with some lettering added on. I drew the Olde English on freehand, which was grueling. I don't have a photocopier or scanner at my house, so I couldn't photocopy the lettering to the size I needed to trace. It was much harder than I expected.

At this time, I decided that I would ONLY listen to The Clash while I was painting. I thought it might help the spirit of the piece or some other art fag sounding type of thing.
I raged to so much Clash. It was awesome.

After lightly sketching the basics on with pencil, here's the first bit of the portrait taking shape, before I outlined the rest of the painting.

Here's the almost-finished portrait with most of the rest outlined. Perhaps 7 or 8 hours of drawing/painting at this point.
I normally don't work this "loose", so it was nerve wracking to just paint blind (and backwards). I had not planned out colors, how to pull off the stained glass effect or anything else, for that matter.

and the finished product.

It's like 16x24 and half inches, or some equally difficult to frame size. I think about 15 to 17 hours of painting time. I was in slow motion for this one.

The first day of fall

2009-09-22T21:30:00.000-07:00

Well, since I'm posting after midnight, I suppose it's not quite correct, but who's keeping track?
Here's what I saw a few doors down from my house while walking my dog this evening. This might be the first time In my entire life that I've been ready for summertime to end.
Bring on the hoodie weather.

RVA

2009-09-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

I've tattooed in Richmond, VA off and on since August of 2000...and somehow I never managed to do a City of Richmond logo. I finally got the chance a few days ago.
Of course, it's a bit warped due to the curve of the back of the arm. Thanks Caitrin.

2009-09-21T19:24:00.001-07:00

When I was younger, I got my hands on a huge book called "Marvel: five fabulous decades of the world's greatest comics". It's mostly just a history of the company with tons of great old comic pages, but what I studied to no end was in the very back of the book. A few pages were dedicated to showing how a page of a comic was penciled, then lettered, ink and colored by Mark Texeira. Holy crap! I fueled my obsession for seeing how my art heroes broke the work down and applied it to the page. Since then, I've always been on the lookout for similar "in progress" pieces. Sometimes they're more interesting than the finished product.

It's one thing I hate about tattooer's "sketchbooks" that are flooding the marketplace like acne on a teenager's back. They're just boring. Finished line drawings of tattoos you can already see in their portfolios (for the most part). Rarely do you see actual sketching, where you see the process.....the road taken to get to the final drawing.

So, with that said, this blog will include a lot of that from my own drawing table....as well as whatever else I find interesting throughout my days and nights.
To start, here are a few shots from a recent watercolor I did. I got the idea of doing this blog during the stages of that painting, so I didn't really take enough pictures at the time....

Here's my initial sketch on bristol board.

Closeup of sketch.

After getting the sketch where I like it, I transfer it to the watercolor paper with very light pencil lines, then start to ink it.

After outlining, the fist stages of shading.

and the finished painting...