Want To Make Your Ink Slinger Laugh Hysterically? Buy Them A Copy of "Temporary Tattoos"
Written: Aug 31 '05 (Updated Aug 21 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: Some nice designs, step buy step instructions, pain free and temporary.
Cons: Some of the ideas and designs are just plain senseless and look absurd
The Bottom Line: A nice book for beginners to temporary tattoos but if you are serious about it, go with something that offers you more variety and application techniques.
Freak369's Full Review: Erick Aveline and Joyce Chargueraud - Temporary Ta...
I guess it’s no secret that I have a fascination with tattoos and body piercing. Ever since I was little I liked checking out the ink that people had, trying to figure out why they got a certain design or had it placed on a specific part of their body. Being in the ‘ink slinging’ industry I come across a lot of books about tattoos and the one thing that always irks me is that the people who write them or create them are ink-free. How can you write about something that you’ve never experienced? With that being said, the book “Temporary Tattoos” was something that I had to buy for the shop - if for nothing more than shear entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, if someone chooses to not get a tattoo or backs out at the last minute I don’t get the least bit angry. What does tick me off is the people that come in and ask for a temporary tattoo that they can wear to a concert or for a night out at the clubs. If you want that, go buy a temporary tattoo kit and get your girlfriend to do it.
Temporary Tattoos
First off, you have to take this book with a grain of salt. If you judge it just by what you see and the designs on the models you will be rolling on the floor in hysterics. One only has to leaf through the book to see some of the utterly ridiculous things that these people were made to wear to understand why I had to buy a copy of this for the shop. In our downtime we get bored and when we get bored we get dangerous. The last time there was a two hour lag between appointments we ended up grabbing the fire extinguishers and shooting them off outside. The moral here is ... fire extinguishers aren’t toys. When I brought the book into the shop I didn’t voice an opinion on it, I wanted to see what everyone else thought of it before I said anything. Just as I thought, everyone got really quiet and looked around, they didn’t want to trash it in case I liked it but they didn’t want to seem enthused about it in case I hated it. It sat there for the better part of the day - everyone looked at it like it was going to jump up and do a trick.
Truth be told this isn’t a bad book but the people that created it are so “white bread” [meaning non tattooed and on the boring side] that you have to wonder why they would try to pull off something like this. They are French so I guess I should cut them some slack but when you see this monstrosity you will understand why I can’t take this completely seriously as a real “body art” type of book. Don’t get me wrong, it has an awesome introduction to doing temporary tattoos including the things you will need to work with, different types of stencils and stamps you can use as well as how to use freehand techniques. That’s what makes up the first part of the book; cosmetic products and accessories [brushes, inks, paints, body gels etc] that you can find at most body art stores both online and in the retail world as well as the art materials [scissors, pencils, Bristol board, foam core etc]. These are just suggestions they are offering, you can use what ever you like to make the designs.
You get a quick lesson in how to make your own stamps from foam board / foam core and the procedure is a lot easier than it looks. You are also shown how to make a stencil that can be used to make a layered design [if you rotate it and use different colors] as well as stencils and designs that can be applied free hand. These sections are laid out nicely and list all the things that you will need to have on hand to complete the task. After you have made the design you wish to apply, then it comes time to pick out a body part that works best with it. This is something that book sort of skips over, but since this is something that will wash off in a day or two it’s not really a big deal. You can experiment with different colors and sizes and once you get the hang of making a stencil or a stamp, you have a lot of creative freedom.
The bulk of the book deals with the actual temporary tattoos; but I will be honest here, all you are seeing is eye candy. The design application is explained and there are step by step photos of how it is done but if you honestly think that you are going to get results like these your first few times out, you are going to be in for a rude awakening. I truly get nauseous every time I see a girl walk through the door wearing a cut off shirt - she is either trying to advertise her skank factor [bra size x IQ - body weight] or she is there to get a tattoo around her navel. And wouldn’t you know it, that is the first temporary tattoo that they show in the book - the sun on a girls navel. Throughout the book you will see a wide variety of tattoos like wrist wraps, tribal, Celtic, Star of Maghreb as well as Hindu and Egyptian influences. There is a lot of variety to what the book offers in the way of designs but it only gives you the basics of it and doesn’t really give you a lot to work with outside the original design concept.
All the sections are listed at the front of the book and when you see it, it is slightly impressive. There’s everything from dragons to Chinese ideograms to some just for Halloween. This is where I peed my pants - and not in a good way. Page 51 shows a wanna be vixen with a witch tattoo on her chest - it comes off soooooo cheesy I had to grab some nacho chips to go along with it. But the worst was the model on page 51; how cool are you if you have a bat temporarily tattooed on your face? Come on now, that’s just plain silly but you have to actually see it to get the full impact of why I am laughing so hard I am almost in tears. At the end of the book you are given the basic templates of the tattoo designs that you can photocopy to work with, they also have numbers next to the names of them indicating which type of application works best with each design [stamp, stencil or brush].
The Bottom Line
Maybe I am a little biased since I am in the ink industry; temporary tattoos are a nice thing for girls who are going to a sleep over party or people who want to get a taste of what it’s like to get some ink but it’s just not the same. There’s no pain involved in it and you are limited in the way of how artistic you can get. Most of the designs in the book are easy to create but as I said, you have to take it with a grain of salt. The people that did these are experienced artists and chances are the first few attempts you make won’t turn out the way you expect them to. The book costs $9.99 and might be worth it if you are someone that wants to have a small temporary tattoo business in an already existing store [something along the line of a Hot Topic or trendy clothing store] but if you are serious about it, there are bigger and better books to invest in. I’d give this a six out of ten; if it didn’t have all the hokey stuff in it and had more designs to work with then chances are I would have taken it a little more seriously but as it stands, some of the stuff they try to ‘create’ just looks silly.
Removeable tattoos are great fun - clean, safe and don t damage the skin. This book has a series of colorful double page spreads with sixty different ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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