247 Ink Magazine (December/January) 2015-2016 Issue #6 | Page 154

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 152