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ADAM SKY
Interview by William Thidemann
Photos courtesy of Adam Sky
From the February 2008 issue of PRICK Magazine
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 Adam Sky |
 Tattoo by Adam Sky |
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Hailing from one of the greatest cities in the world, Adam Sky is one of those guys you should pay attention to. Aside from being the man behind Tattoodles, he is now—due to a recent acquisition—owner of Read Street Forum. Adam is a solid tattoo artist with years of experience. This is one of those guys that lays in the cuts and get busy.
We first came across Adam at the Vancouver Tattoo Convention about four or five years ago and since then we've been paying attention. He is a busy man and a real force in the Canadian tattoo world, and his international exposure continues to grow. Adam helps to prove that Canada is not just the U.S.'s largest suburb but is, in itself, a viable and vibrant part of the tattoo world.
How and when did you get started in tattooing? Have you always been in Vancouver?
I did my first tattoo in 1986. I was living in a punk rock party house in a really run down area of East Vancouver. I lived in a house with eight other punk rock kids. We called it the Hell House—we all worked shit jobs washing dishes or as bicycle couriers and to blow off steam we’d have LSD parties every Saturday night. Our acid parties got crazier and more notorious until hundreds of people started showing up for them. The rules were that you had to be tripping on psychedelics if you were going to party with us.
One night some biker showed up on his Harley with a cookie tin full of homemade tattoo guns and Indian inks. The biker got all fucked up and passed out on our living room floor. Everyone was super bummed because he was supposed to do some tattoos. I had some art schooling and, since I was tripping somewhat less than everyone else, I was nominated as the tattoo artist of the evening. I did a few tattoos and, although I was shitting my pants, people seemed pretty pleased with what I tattooed. When the biker came to, he checked out my work and told me he was so impressed that I could keep his homemade tattoo rig if I tattooed him.
Our Saturday night LSD tattoo parties turned into Sunday morning tattoo parties which then turned in to Monday afternoon tattoo parties and before I knew it, I was tattooing almost every day. Since we were all punk rock and broke, my rate of charge was based on food and alcohol. A small tattoo would cost you a bag of Doritos and a half-liter of chocolate milk; a medium-sized tattoo would run you a deli style sandwich; and a large tattoo would set you back a case of beer. Since everyone had no money, a case of beer would mean a case of Pilsner, which is the skunkiest Canadian beer you could imagine. Once in a while I’d get real beer, which was no-name-brand beer. We actually had generic beer that just said ‘BEER’ on the can and nothing else.
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Who were your influences, what inspired you to start tattooing?
My early influences were pretty much beer, Doritos, and sandwiches. After a few years of fucking people up with homemade tattoos, I realized that if I wanted a future in tattooing, I'd have to start taking it seriously and start respecting my customers by no longer creating horrible tattoos. I realized that I needed professional training or, rather, re-training in order to ditch all of my bad habits. I went to every tattoo shop in the Vancouver area trying to find an apprenticeship. No one would hire me. No one was interested in helping me come up in the business because by that time I had a bad reputation as a scratcher.
Eventually I pulled a super-pussy move and opened a street shop and hired pro artists to work with me. The plan was to just glean what information I could from them. My first shop was Sacred Heart Tattoo, which is still located on Vancouver's very affluent West Side. We opened Sacred Heart in 1993, right at the crest of the wave of the tattoo renaissance. We had some really fantastic artists working at Sacred back then, including Theo Jak, Bill Baker, Rob Hope, and a bunch of other mind blowing Canadian tattoo artists. I ran Sacred for 3 years and then sold it for enough money to buy a Ducati motorcycle. I used that motorcycle to ride to San Francisco where I found work tattooing at various spots in California.
Do you paint? Is it all tattoo related?
I don't paint, but I wish that I had time to paint. I work in a custom tattoo studio now with no flash and virtually every tattoo I do requires a massive amount of preparatory drawing. My drawing schedule takes up all of my artistic time and energy, leaving absolutely no time to create anything for art's sake. I admire tattooers who paint well and I wish that I was well-rounded artistically — I'm kind of a one trick pony with my mediums. I can illustrate and I can tattoo.
Do you think painting is necessary to be able to stay competitive in tattooing?
Painting definitely gives a tattooer an advantage amongst their peers. I'm certainly impressed by tattooers who can paint well. It makes me feel that the eight years I spent in art school were really a massive waste of money seeing as I didn’t retain anything to do with painting or sculpture or macramé. I have a bad habit of devoting my abilities only to where the money is. I reckon that if I started painting for myself and not with revenue in mind, I'd probably be a happier individual.
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What is the role of tattoo flash in a modern shop?
I don't know what it's like everywhere else, but it certainly seems that customers are much savvier than they were only a few years ago. I think that we, as tattooers, have successfully started to educate the public en masse—be it through magazines, the tattoo reality shows, or other media. People overwhelmingly want custom work now. But that doesn’t negate the role of flash in the tattoo shop; flash is still an excellent way to see how other tattooers draw common symbols in our language of tattoo art. Flash is a free range to reproduce these symbols in our own way and create custom work from it. Flash isn’t irrelevant, but its role seems to be changing.
Tell me about your studio.
I've got a private tattoo studio in Gastown, which is Vancouver's historical district. There's no signage, no walk-in traffic, and if you passed it by on the street, you'd never know there was tattooing going on inside. I think that with the access the Internet gives us, it's possible to operate a tattoo studio without a storefront. Our studio is modern and clean and very comfortable to work in.
I work alongside Mikel, who is a friend of 15 years and a great tattooer. And our studio doesn’t have a name. Well, we give it a new name every month. Last month it was Thor's Magic Hammer of Sexy Times. This month we’re calling it The Wizard's Sleeve. The concept of not naming the studio was to shift the focus of reputation to the individual artist and not the shop.
How is it living and working in Vancouver?
Vancouver is consistently rated by the international press as one of the top three cities in the entire world to live in. I think we're always tied with Geneva or Luxemburg for quality of living. It’s beautiful and temperate (for Canada). One thing I should mention is that we have a preposterously skewed percentage of beautiful women who live in Vancouver. It's just fucking ridiculous some days. I know dozens of absolutely punch ‘em out, knock down beautiful ladies who do nothing but complain about being single. And all the dudes walk around looking like they get laid way too much. You know that look that guys get when sex is just too easy? They start wearing cheesy terry cloth track suits and walk around with a dumb ass grin like they don’t give a shit because their stripper girlfriend will be home in half an hour with a flap of coke and a new video game for the Xbox; anything to keep their man happy and on the couch, you know?
Do you think it is important to develop a particular style?
I think that if you want to be known as a unique tattooer, you’ve got to develop a style but developing a style can be completely non-intentional, which was my circumstance. I never thought I’d be interested in tattooing pictures of flowers but I found it enjoyable and easy once I had done a few. My customers recognized that so I started to do a lot of it.
One thing I realized is that the type of work you do is the type of work you're going to be asked to do later. For instance, I had a big tribal dragon tattoo in my portfolio and I got asked to do big tribal dragons constantly because I had that damn thing in my book. Because people liked the ones they saw in my book, all I was doing were tribal dragons. My nickname became 'Adam Sky the Tribal Guy' — and I didn’t even like tribal dragons. As soon as I took all of the tribal out of my book, I stopped getting asked to do that kind of work. From then on I only put work in my portfolio that I was really, really stoked on—stuff that I’d like to do more of. Even if that meant I only had three pictures in my portfolio. And that's when I started to see folks ask me to do fun tattoos that I was genuinely interested in, which subsequently allowed me to refine what I think of as my style of tattooing. My style isn't on purpose, it's just how I like to draw and tattoo.
What styles of tattooing interest you the most?
I just like looking at any tattooing that's innovative and different. I don't have any interest in anyone's work that's derivative. Sure, we can all have influences and it's good to draw inspiration from a variety of other artists and other tattooers, but you should use that influence as a tool in finding your own path.
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Tell me about Tattoodles, what is it and how did it come to be?
Tattoodles.com is a Web site I launched several years ago. Its original mission was to become an online resource for tattoo flash for tattoo artists. Artists could submit their original designs to our gallery and, in return for their contribution, that artist would have a lifetime membership to download everyone else's flash. Tattoodles also broadcasts an online tattoo community where people can network. We also host the infamous Read Street Tattoo Forum which, as many people know, is the most exclusive and resourceful tattoo artist discussion forum on the Web.
How many people use the site? Are they primarily using it for reference or for networking?
We have approximately eighty thousand registered users and we sign up hundreds of new
users each month. Mostly, Tattoodles is a resource for tattoo designs. We've opened up our galleries for tattoo collectors and enthusiasts alike, so it's a great resource for tattoo customers and not just artists. Our online community is strong and tightly knit; I'm always delighted to see people use Tattoodles as a networking tool. I've seen a lot of tattooers get work from being a member of our online community, it is a way to attract new customers or a way to put artists in touch with shop owners, etc. It makes me very happy to see the Web site that I’ve poured my life into being used constructively to help tattooers improve their careers.
How do you get artwork for the site?
Tattooers donate their artwork. If we accept six or more designs from an artist, we award that artist with a free, lifetime membership to our galleries. We're updating our galleries daily with new flash and new photos and every design is credited with the artist's name and shop contact information, so it's a fantastic tool for self-promotion. Members also get a community profile page where they can create private, personal galleries. You can keep a blog, private message with other members, and be a part of our discussion forums. Lots of our contributors don’t stop at six designs, most donate dozens, if not hundreds, of their images. The more an artist donates, the more exposure they get on the web site, and since Tattoodles garners about a quarter of a million hits a day, the exposure can be quite valuable to that artist.
What are your future plans? Any travel plans?
This January I'll be in Los Angeles doing a guest spot at Katherine Von Drachenberg's High Voltage Tattoo. I'm super excited about tattooing with the L.A. Ink crew! I've worked on and off in Hollywood for a long time and whenever life in Canada seems to be getting a little routine, I throw down in Hollywood and shake up my shit and remember that life is all about rock and roll and party times.
Any last thoughts or anything I forgot?
Zombies rule Belgium.
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