sleeve

ok, think i found the font for the quotation mark tattoo i want. yay!

now, let's go into said tattoo.

i think i've explained this to maybe one person, but i wanted to put out there why i want the sleeve that i want, starting with the quotation mark tattoo.

it started off as ripping off some guy i follow on flickr who's a designer and was in grad school and had to make his own font, and has gradually been adding on to his arm with characters in different fonts and colors.

that was the start. i thought it was a great idea. but then i had to spin it and make it my own.

as many of you know, i have a sordid, mixed past where i've worked as a designer, writer, editor, manager; you name it, i've probably done it. but a big driving force in my life has been to be a writer, in some shape or form. the whole reason of quitting my perfectly fine, stressful editorial job back in '01 was to go back to school and work on being a writer.

which didn't turn out all so well.

but anyway. when i was a designer, i was a huge font geek. i was way into typography, and was always trying to find just the right font to fit in with the right layout, and if i found a font that was close, i'd drop it into illustrator and tweak it until it was just what i wanted. in my head, the right font with the right layout helped convey the story better.

and that's where it ties back into the writer part.

when i think back on it, i've wanted to be a writer my whole life. as a child, i'd write stories weaving me into whatever cartoon i liked at the time. i'd write myself into most anything i read, because i loved everything i read, and i wanted to be a part of it. as i grew older, i found an outlet in journalism. not only could i have an opinion, but people could read it! or i could inform them about the major news of the day! and even later in adulthood, after quitting a job that stilted me creatively, i found myself working a delivery job, and being inspired. all around me were stories just waiting to be told. and it was sort of a renaissance period for me. then i went back to advertising/marketing, and thought i wanted to write for that. but not so much. or maybe it's because i ended up stuck with all the monotonous, uncreative assignments. which drained me a bit more.

anyway. what i'm trying to get to is, the sleeve that i want, what i ultimately want to get, i want it to be a work over time. i don't want to get it all at once, because that's not how stories are written. i want to work on it over time. i want to select the fonts, and decide which character would look best in that font. and in which color. and then add on. i want my sleeve to tell a story. i want to be able to, when asked, explain to people why i selected each font and each character and each color. i want each character to be a chapter, where they all build on each other until, bam, you have a complete story.

basically, i want to wear a novel on my left arm. my novel. and maybe in the end, it would make a hell of a dust jacket.