don't get me wrong, i support you as a flash artist! what i was trying to get across is that flash is NOT the way to make money, either as a tattoo artist or as an illustrator. it is definitely a way to increase your skills and knowledge of linework, shading, and general art. so if you are doing it to better yourself, great. if you are doing it to fatten your wallet, good luck!

>>"I posted this here not because I wanted other people to do the work for me, but because I thought as this was a flash artist tribe people might be supportive of someone who wanted to have a go at it themselves. I guess I was wrong."<<

Never once thought you were asking others to do the work for you. Never suggested such. No one here is being unsupportive of you "having a go" at drawing flash. It's your financial motivation that triggers the response. But if you think about it, we ARE being supportive, by telling you straight out that drawing flash "to make a few bucks" is not likely to happen, no matter how original you are or how good you are at illustration, or how brilliant your take on how to "get money" with originality and style, or how much you know of one person who made some money working an entire summer drawing flash. Otherwise, there's a LOT of DAMNED GOOD artists tattooing who'd be making "a few extra bucks" drawing flash.

Again, if you want to draw flash because you love it, great -as I said before- and I support anyone doing so, but that's about all you're gonna get out of it. Even if you do manage to make some money doing it, there's another factor that many professional tattooers are going to get pissed about.

If you're ever on the floor of a tattoo convention, you'll see that just about every shop has flash for sale, and most of that is decent artwork and "trendy styles", but they're established tattooers selling stuff for $2-3/sheet typically (as in 10 sheets for $20-30, with a production cost of at LEAST $1/sheet for cheap color copies, and more for nice prints), and NOT making their booth price back doing so..... but if you try selling flash booth to booth withOUT paying for a booth yourself, the tattooers at the show will get mad, because they DID pay for the privilege. A LOT of tattooers have a problem with people not in the industry, trying to "cash in" on what we have committed our lives to (like drawing flash because you see it as a way to cash in), whether you're a non-tattooer getting rich owning tattoo shops, anonymous Chinese manufacturers selling "starter kits" and cheap knock-off Mickey Sharpz, Juan Puente, or Aaron Cain machines to anyone with fifty bucks (look at e-bay sometime- this is STEALING from the people whose machines they're copying), or a non-tattooer selling tattoo flash, precisely because so many working tattooers commit 50-70 hours/week to their craft for the total of their adult lives, and in a saturated market there's only so much of the pie to go around. No, our displeasure isn't likely to make people stop doing these things, but we don't have to like it and aren't likely to keep quiet about it, either.

Draw away. NO one here is telling you not to. Just telling you like it is about the realities of tattooing (AND the reception you're likely to get from other professional tattooers, who would be your market). Of course, if you have zero integrity, there's nothing stopping you from selling stuff on eBay to 15 year old kids- they're already buying $100 tattoo "starter kits" from the Chinese manufacturers who don't give a shit about tattooing except to make a buck either.

T