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Tattoo Artists Interviews Portuguese Tattoo Artist Pedro Fraga I came across Pedro one day and was blown away by his work. Something about his style reminded me of work by artists I had encountered when I was in Barcelona. We hooked up and I asked him if he was interested in talking about life and work as a tattoo artist.Here it is... My name is Pedro Fraga. I'm 29. I live near Lisbon in Portugal and have been trying to make a living at professional tattooing here for the past two and half years now. I mostly work out of the Queen of Hearts shop in Bairro Alto. Clichéd as it may sound, I pretty much liked tattoos all my life. I got my first tattoo when I was 19, I guess, mostly because they were so expensive to get back then. I also have family photos of me drawing ever since I was 4 years old. I studied a bit of arts (graphic design). Then I almost finished college studying philosophy. I worked a lot of different jobs and one day while drawing something for a friend of mine who was also into tattoos the idea came up...why don't you try it, man? Well...I did. Portugal is real small and backwards in most respects. But hey, we have a great climate and real mellow crime rate too, so who's bitchin'!
Before... I just couldn't find anyone to teach me, though and supplies were pretty much impossible to get other than through the internet. It wasn't really in my nature to just get a starter kit and start experimenting on my friends either. I ended up going to Madrid for a couple of weeks and took a crash course on tattooing that left me broke. I bought some supplies there too. When I got back home I started tattooing the entire neighbourhood! I had a late afternoon job and in the mornings I did tattoos. Five or six months later a guy who was a partner with the owner of Queen of Hearts saw some work of mine on a friend of his and she gave him my number. Shortly after that I was working with them. I worked three street shops in all. I still work mostly on a walk in basis today. It's hard work and you don't get to do your stuff so much. In the begining it was really hard to get people to want my custom work the way I like it. Traditional is not too big in Portugal. Now I tattoo maybe 30% my stuff, 60% custom the clients way and 10% plain flash. You do get to do a lot of different stuff this way and so you learn a lot. Not one year after starting to tattoo I worked the 2004 Barcelona International Convention and have been going to the most conventions I can get to watching lots of different styles and techniques from around the world and keeping up to date on the supplies and procedures.
...After Also I did my first original piece in a convention at Geneve in 2005 on a guy called Dave an American Tattoo Artist working in Belgium who had liked my designs and asked to do whatever on his bicep. The conventions crowd is a lot more informed and therefore interesting to work with than your average street shop walk in. My influences come mostly from the traditional vocabulary. I love and collect vintage designs and watercolor flash sheets too, but I also pick up most of what I learn from the new generation of artists that do traditional, not so much from the big legends like Sailor Jerry, Lyle Tuttle and Ed Hardy to name a few but artists like Uncle Allan, Javi Andrade, Matt Shama, Rudy Fritch, Chad Koeplinger and Greg Christian. I love Japanese tattoos and ethnographic tribals a lot too. I still consider myself an aspiring tattoo artist, really so my advice for anyone who's is struggling at it too is just to keep at it. Be sure to do it from the heart because the world doesn't really need anymore money hungry tattoo hustlers doing bad work for big bucks and giving everybody else in the industry a bad name. Also, the best thing in my opinion for anyone wanting to tattoo is to draw and paint a lot. I do watercolor paintings and flash sheets as often as I can and I learn as much from it as from tattooing or attending conventions. Painting is actually as much fun as tattooing for me right now but they both go hand in hand. That's pretty much it, I guess...
Weird mix of old school, japanese tattoos and cartoons! Check out more of Pedro below... www.tattoosbypedro.comwww.myspace.com/tattoosbypedro Popular Tattoo Designs: angel tattoos, black and gray tattoos, butterfly tattoos, celtic tattoos, dragon tattoos, erotic tattoos, heart tattoos, female tattoos, flower tattoos, Japanese tattoos, kanji tattoos, lower-back tattoos, religious tattoos, rose tattoos, star tattoos, tribal tattoos, more tattoos >>
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