(click to enlarge)
Since I was just a little girl I remember seeing this picture of my Grandma all over our house. It’s something that she loved to talk about as it was the first portrait she ever had done, she was only 16 years old and it was the first time she’d ever worn make-up. I’m sure sometime in the early 1950’s she cut it and put it into its oval frame and never left it. To me it always represented a time when my Grandma was young and beautiful and every time I saw it it reminded me of how much alike we could be. When I started really getting into tattoo culture I knew right away that I wanted to pay tribute to my Grandmother by having that image tattooed on me. I told her about it a couple years ago and although she’s always been resistant to the idea, I know that she is a little bit excited about it. I finally got her to lend me the picture so that I could take it home and give it to my tattoo artist, but I wanted to fix it up a little bit as it has faded over the last 60 years due to sun damage.
The first scan is of the original photo. As you can see there is a dark ring around the photo which is the original colouring, this part was covered up by the frame and never had the sun touch it. I wanted to return the photo to its natural state so I used Photoshop to restore it back to what I think is a pretty close match to its original loveliness. The idea for my tattoo is going to be a portrait with a baroque design style framing it, but I wanted to add a bit of colour into the face when tattooing, not too much and very subtle, just to bring it to life. I thought it’d be interesting to see what colour would do to the photo, so I did a bit of work on it and the version on the far right is how it came out.
Personally I like the colour version the best, it has a very misty but lifelike quality about it. I tried to use subtle colours and really punch out certain aspects like the fact that my Grandma has blue eyes and that her lips were probably a pretty dark red as this was shot in the 1940’s. Over all, I think it turned out pretty amazingly and I can’t wait for her to see the finished result.
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