July 4th at Latus Harley-Davidson

I had the good pleasure to be invited along to this event out at Latus Harley-Davidson for the weekend of the 4th. The event was all about Jason and Garage 31 doing some airbrush tattoos but he was down with me putting up some of my work for people to see. Overall the event went really well. Set up wasn't too bad, nothing was destroyed, and we had a lot of fun. There weren't as many people as there were last year, from what I was told, but to me it went really well. They had the Wall of Death there, which was incredible all on it's own,

as well as plenty of bikes, plenty of food, and plenty of people wanting airbrush tattoos. I also had the pleasure to meet Marshall Parks an extremely talented artist who is pushing the limits of Auto Air paints on a regular basis. I'll be writing more on him in another post.

I wanted to talk a little more about airbrush tattoos because that was the focus on the event. I fell in love with this stuff. It was great interacting with people, I can tell that there is a little bit of extra cash to be made during down times, and it was something new. The final result actually looked pretty close to a real tattoo and it was easy enough to do some freehand airbrushing on everything from arms to heads.

The paint we used was Body of Art by Temptu. It was an 8 oz bottle and ran around $34. We also, through out two days of airbrushery, didn't even hit the halfway mark (and we didn't just keep the airbrushing to skin). It's an alcohol based paint and sprays a little on the thick side, but adding a little rubbing alcohol to it seemed to loosen it up quite a bit. We were using the Iwata Eclipse CS. One thing I did notice was that if the paint sat for more than 20 minutes it would separate. It didn't take much more than a couple swishes with the cup to get it mixed up again, but we did burn through some ink before we knew it was happening.

We stuck to some simple stencils that Jason had put together but every now and then we would do some freehanding on ourselves to draw attention.

The process was pretty simple. Apply some rubbing alcohol with some cotton swabs to get rid of any oils. Dry that area with the airbrush (this also gets the person receiving the tattoo comfortable with the feeling of air on their skin), lay down the tattoo, then put some baby powder over it. As long as the person doesn't scrub heavy in the shower the tattoo will stay a couple days.

So now I'll be looking into making something like this happen. It's great fun and it will get my work out there while earning me a little extra money. Just one more thing I can do with my airbrush.

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