Guy Aitchison and Michele Wortman: Apple Ink
When most people think of tattoos, they don’t think of computers and software. But for tattoo artists Guy Aitchison and Michele Wortman of Hyperspace Studios, the Mac is as essential as skin.
Wortman and Aitchison are well known for their innovative ink. Both artists appeared on the cable television show Tattoo Wars on TLC in 2007, and Aitchison has an upcoming guest spot on TLC’s popular reality show LA Ink. (His sister Hannah, also an accomplished tattoo artist, is a series regular.) Though their styles and artistic approaches are distinct, both rely on Macs to research, develop, and share their work.
“I’ve used a Mac to create almost all my designs since I started tattooing,” says Wortman. “We both understood how we could grow from it and integrate it into our art. When we first started using Photoshop, we realized, ‘Wow, we can scale up photos, modify them, and collage things together.’ With the Mac, we can take our art much further.”
Indelibly Mac
Aitchison’s Mac Pro and Wortman’s iMac are just the latest in a long line of Macs at Hyperspace Studios, beginning with an early G3 desktop model and extending through various Mac laptops.
“We’re inseparable from our Macs, and have been for a decade,” Aitchison says. “Computers and the Internet have completely revolutionized our trade. Having the ability to scan, resize, flip, and of course research design ideas online is just amazing.”
With tools such as Apple’s Safari browser and Adobe Photoshop, the two artists have endless resources for getting designs exactly right. It’s a far cry from their pre-Mac days, when designing a tattoo of a specific image was a much more difficult proposition.
“You’d have to go to the library, and if you were lucky you might find one book with one picture,” Aitchison recalls. “It might not fit very well, but you had no choice but to use it. Then you’d use a copy machine to blow it up in increments — and hopefully it would be one percent increments, not just 144 percent or 72 percent. That’s how we used to have to do it!”
3D Ink
Soon after Aitchison began tattooing in 1988, he made a name for himself with his astonishingly three-dimensional designs. Densely inked, semi-abstract tunnels, vortices, and stalactites surge across the skin, sometimes combined with more figurative images such as thorns, hooks, roots, and machine parts. Aitchison enhances the illusion of dimension still more through careful placement of the forms in relation to underlying muscles and bone.
To create a new design, Aitchison typically starts with digital photos of the body parts he’ll be working with, which he imports into Photoshop on his Mac Pro. He sketches out the overall flow of the piece, switching between digital input via a graphics tablet and conventional pencil drawings on paper printouts. “I scan the drawings, blow them up, clean them up, reprint them, and redraw them,” he says.
Whatever the artistic task at hand, the Mac is a key creative partner at Hyperspace Studios. “Guy and I are extremely interconnected with our Macs,” says Wortman. “We like to incorporate technology into our everyday lives as much as possible.”
“Our Macs are indispensable,” Aitchison agrees. “We do plenty of analog projects, from painting to sculpting, but at some point it all gets funneled through the digital world. The ability to function smoothly between multiple creative applications makes it very easy to move between different media, and between the digital and analog worlds.”
Aitchison’s tattoo designs are often closely related to his work in other media. For example, he might create a painting or drawing that later inspires a tattoo. Conversely, he says, “If I've done a series of tattoos and I really like the imagery, I might do a large painting from that same subject. So the same themes get knocked back and forth between mediums.”
