The Left Leg Begins

I don't seem to have much luck with trains. I got to the station for the start of the left leg and found a load of cancellations, apparently a power failure somewhere between King's Cross and Stevenage. Very much how the right leg began. Fate is funny like that. As it turned out, mine was about the only train not cancelled, so no real drama.

For me, this is the real start of the bodysuit. The right leg on its own was, if I'm honest, one tattoo. Two legs make a matching pair, and that pair is the grounding everything else sits on. So, really excited for this one.

I managed to take more photos this time. Not everything, but the initial rough sketch, the Sharpie drawing, and the outlining are all there. What I missed was some grey shading on the finger waves, which we started without outlining first, a surprise for session one. You'll see that in the healing photos.

Got to the studio and went through the initial sketch. The koi on this leg will be orange and red, a contrast to the black koi on the right, and the composition looks great, as you can see in the image. One of the things we talked about was symmetry. My instinct, as someone not steeped in this art for as long as Deneka has been, is to want the two legs to mirror each other. And you do want a degree of symmetry, but not horizontal or vertical symmetry. Instead of having elements like flowers line up across the two legs, you place them on an angle that cuts through. You can see it in the chrysanthemums on the front inner calf, which sit at slightly different angles on the left and the right, and in the two koi, where one is lower than the other. On the back, not yet outlined, the big chrysanthemum will be behind the left knee, lower than the one on the right which sits on the upper back of the thigh. That one is going to be spicy. It's the same simple complexity I've talked about before: the same few elements on both legs, but the way they're offset against each other means it never reads as a copy.

The other thing we discussed was colour. From Deneka's point of view it's important to fix the colours before the design is drawn up, because that determines where all the other elements go, the flowers in particular, so that one side doesn't end up too dark or too bright. All of that is now locked down.

The rough sketch became the refined Sharpie drawing much more quickly than the first time, because the right leg was there as the reference: where it starts, where it ends, where the koi goes, the waves and the other elements. Most of that was predefined.

Then we started outlining, the koi first. For some reason this session hurt more than I remember. The first ten minutes were intense, and then it settled, but outlining definitely registers higher for me than shading, especially around the knee. I'd put this one at a seven or eight. When we moved on to some grey wash it was completely fine, far more tolerable than the lines.

Overall, a great session. Healing now under second skin. Back in November, where the plan is to outline the back of the leg and then get into more grey and black work. Progress will be thick and fast. I'm sticking to single sessions this time rather than back-to-backs.