A Gourdy Tattoo

Many people have not learned how to draw. Until the skills can be attained, there are ways a budding gourd arteeEst can enjoy the pictures and shapes they find desirable. There is the old fashioned carbon paper, which is hard to find these days and smears easily when it IS used. Graphite paper is useful, but the tracing skills have be honed since flat paper on a curved surface can be challenging. Then, of course, there is the question of intellectual property and using someone else's work. An easy, and inexpensive, solution to that problem is to use works already in the public domain and therefore copyright-free. Dover Publications is a popular resources for public domain images. Always use images in the public domain folks, or cite the source.

In the Gourd Garage Day this week, a tattoo machine was tried as an alternative to tracing. As a way of marking a gourd, it was easy. We used images from an old papercutting calendar, made the tattoo, transferred the image with a wet sponge onto a scrap gourd, woodburned the image, cleaned off the lines, and cut a pin out of the main gourd. The woodburning volunteer says it was easy to tell what had been done and what still needed to be done although to observers it was hard to see what was what. Once the tattoo ink had been washed off with water, the result looked liked it had been burned without any aides.

The process is below...A Cracklin' new perspective! 

1. Straight out of the box,
the learning curve was minimal

2. The images feed into the machine
much like a fax machine would
accept printed materials.

3. We tried several types of images.

4. Dampening the tattoo with water.

5. You can see the used tattoo paper,
and the pads we used
 to wash off the ink.

6. Here's the resulting pin
cut from the scrap gourd.