NBA? It’s the same thing. Some people don’t want to do the groundwork.
They just want to be the player. I don’t want to be a player; I want to be the
coach, owner and everything else.
Do you think that’s the only thing keeping these artists from doing
their own thing or is it fear of stepping out on their own?
Being an artist and not being good at business. Most artists have done art
their whole life for fun. Then they go to college and come out trying to find
a job. They don’t have the set of business and marketing skills because
they didn’t do art for a living, they just jumped in. Now they’re trying to jump
into a business they should have been learning when they were in grade
school. So a lot of artists just don’t have that business side. I was blessed
to not separate business and art. I never did art for free, never. I didn’t have
the luxury of being like “I do art for the passion.” I do art for the passion of
it but my passion extends past the love of the art. I have to do this art with
passion so I can feed my family. I have to put that love into this tattoo so I
can get more clients. I have to go hard every single time I do a piece so I
can attract more people to my business. A lot of people are doing it for selfgratification. I do it not for myself but for a bigger cause. Of course I want
the quality to be good but I’m thinking about “I’ve got this much more money
I can put towards this, I can open up this or I can do that. I can open up this
business using tattoo money. You can use tattoo money to do a lot of things
if you want to. If you’re smart with it you don’t have to be stuck doing tattoos
all your life. You do tattoos to a certain point, open up a shop, create jobs for
younger artists then you can move onto your own art. I’m doing that; I barely
tattoo.
Where did the concept for “Color Outside the Lines” originate?
It was a choice. I had enough money to open up a shop or to do a film. So I
did the shop first because I thought it would create more jobs than the film.
The film was only a three man show. It was me, Artemus Jenkins and my
boy Dreamer who did the score. I opened City of Ink and created more jobs.
You need at least two to three floor managers and at least four to six artists. So I looked at it like, if I did the film first then it wouldn’t really help the
people close to me, so I opened the shop first to create the jobs. Then I had
enough money to do the film. So the film was to really show the culture because a lot of young people just don’t know their history. They don’t know
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