Background Shading, Day One

The line work healed beautifully. Clean, crisp, and every bit as good as I'd hoped. Which is probably why I got a little impatient.

I messaged Deneka to ask whether a back-to-back was a sensible idea, and it turned out Thursday and Friday were both free. So the hotel got booked, a short walk from the studio, and suddenly I was looking at two days on the table instead of one.

This time, I felt calmer. Not the pure adrenaline of session one, just a steadier kind of excitement. I ate properly beforehand, went easy on the fluids (lesson learned)! Progress on every front.

The plan for this session was background. Shading, and a lot of it. This is the stage that really transforms a piece: the moment it stops looking like a drawing on a leg and starts looking like a tattoo. And as you can see in the photos, the focus was the bottom half.

Deneka began by marking out the areas to be filled with a Sharpie, and then we went in. I'd been warned that shading is worse than the line work, and it's true, you definitely feel it more. The first ten minutes were a struggle, no two ways about it. I was also feeling slightly under the weather, nothing worth cancelling over, but enough to notice. Still, once we were into it, the rhythm found me again the same way it did in session one, and we worked through a serious amount of black.

And it is deep. Properly, densely black. By the time we finished around three, the bottom half of the right leg was pretty much done: the nami, the finger waves, all of it packed in.

Then something I hadn't anticipated. In session one I'd ridden the excitement all the way home without noticing anything else. This time, back at the hotel, it hit me just how tired I was, and how hungry. I ordered a burger and wolfed it down. I drank a sports drink, then what must have been four litres of water. My body was clearly in overdrive, repairing itself, and I let it. Leg elevated, wrapped up, early night.

Tomorrow we move to the outside of the leg.

Day one of two done.