Black and White: An Interview with Mike Giant
How long were you doing tattoo art professionally?
I think I did it professionally pretty much full time for 8-9 years and it’s just been the last year or two that I’ve been tattooing friends and old clients here and there, when it’s convenient for both of us and I feel up for it. Because it still is a struggle even more so now on some levels because I’m not in the habit, every time I jump into it, it’s been a week or two even, but I need to at least stay on it at that level. I think or I start to feel like shit because the quality really goes down and im tattooing my best friends in a lot of cases, they have some of my best work and at this point to do some half shit work just sucks.
Agreed. You must turn people down a lot.
I tell people no cause I’m way out of my league, I’m doing it as an amateur again.
It seems like it would just come natural, no?
It comes back, it’s habit energy. Something that we’re real good about as human beings is that we’re able to develop new habits, powerful ones. The problem comes when you cant drop the ones that are no longer helpful.
People seem to have a certain mentality that anything will translate well into tattoo form. Do you find that to be a true assessment?
Tattooing is sculptural, it’s 3-Dimensional. What works on paper is a 2-Dimensional surface. Tattooing is always 3D. There are so many different angles that tattoos need to fit into the body, that’s the main thing. The primary goal of a tattoo artist is that your trying to create things that move and work with the body to accentuate things, to make people look powerful and graceful. But at the same time it can work the other way of course. I certainly work with that crossover. I like that. I have so much love for tattoo imagery that I really proactively want to keep that stuff alive with those stories and symbols. I already can see that if the media or publishers don’t get on something and make it something real, then it just gets lost in history. All kinds of things get lost in history, people just destroy it all. As I’m getting older I’m seeing that I need to be someone who makes history though the media and try to bring some intelligence and some heart at the same time.
Why do you choose to work in black and white almost exclusively?
Mostly because I’m colorblind, I’m red/green colorblind. I see color but I don’t the subtleties and tones and hues that a normal human beings eyes can see. The black and white for me is what happened over the course of my life, it’s just what I gravitate towards naturally, I just fell really comfortable working in black and white. I don’t know what it is about it, it’s just what happened.
For certain projects, color can be an important element. Do you enjoy working with it at all?
I like working with color. In graffiti, colors are paramount, tattoos as well. Now that I’m tattooing kind of non-professionally I don’t have any colors, I don’t even bother with it anymore. I just like the black and white, I love how it reads from a distance. When you strip something down to it bare, simple essentials, there’s so little room for error and I think that’s when your craft can come through. I think that’s something that universally impresses people, when you can kinda dumbfound them with your craft. I worked really hard to make my original drawings look like they could be a vector graphic and even so, the original looked totally smooth and super black as kind of an experiment. I feel like I’ve gotten to a place where I can achieve that and now it’s kind of the other way around, where vector people are trying to replicate what I can do with the
hand. But now as time goes on it’s like “OK, that’s a cool trick, I can make it look like a print”, but now I’m trying to infuse a little bit more hand into the originals at least. For reproduction, the black and white look, I think, still looks pretty rad. I’d like to do some kind of pencil drawings and get that printed onto t-shirts.
Speaking of vector images, is there a reason why you choose the Sharpie as your weapon of choice? Those things seem to bleed quite a bit, making it difficult to make such accurate lines like you produce.
Well it’s really an unruly drawing tool, it bleeds like crazy. Me and Sam Flores talk about controlled bleed, it’s like you gotta learn how to roll with it and sometimes you wanna just let it sit there and ooze out for different textures and all kinds of stuff. I think mostly, it was just readily available. When I was a graffiti writer and we were using them for black books, I was just racking boxes of them and it was the easiest thing, you could go to any store and rack up sharpies. When I was tattooing, kids would always bring me boxes of sharpies as tips. I had to use different markers in Amsterdam when I was there last Summer. I tried out all these different markers and I didn’t like any of them. Sharpies to me, run really fast for most of their life but die fast as well. For the most part, they’re pretty juicy and they can get a drawing done pretty quick. When you use pigment ink markers, which I think are more for drawing stuff, you gotta move a lot slower and I find that really frustrating. It’s the same thing with tattooing, there’s a certain amount of speed that feels good and if you go too slow it wrecks the skin. I like it when it just rips out of the marker, like “Lets do this!”
Haha. When did you start your REBEL8 clothing line?
We officially said we’d do the first REBEL8 shirts in 2003, but we did our first trade show the next year. Seems like a long time ago. I had been doing a lot of freelance work for a lot of different people and I was getting approached by bigger and better clients (better in some ways cause it was better money). Josh and I had gotten to become friends because I was tattooing him. We were hanging out and he just approached me with the idea of doing an exclusive Mike Giant line, cause it seemed like the fan base was there to support an exclusive thing. It sounded reasonable to me at the time since I’m always looking for some kind of way to simplify my life, so that I can just do this and that and go to sleep. It’s real simple and pretty much everyday the same, Ive found the routine to be of the most benefit, especially for me as a human being. We like routine.
Running a clothing line is a tough business. Do you find REBEL8 consuming most of your time, which in turn takes away from other projects?
We started it up and eventually got big enough that we started writing out contracts and figuring out long term goals. I slowly started saying no more and more to freelance jobs and explaining the situation. It’s to the point now where I don’t really have much time to do anything other than REBEL8. I have a seasonal list of things that I need to have taken care of and that really keeps me busy. As the company grows, my percentage of the company (the earnings), continues to increase, so it pretty cool cause we’ve all been on the same trip, it’s been growing nice and steady. Now we’re starting to see that it has potential to get much bigger in the next few years and it’s exciting to see, it’s like this organic thing that’s growing and we just want to keep feeding it as much as it wants to eat. It’s like “Wow, it’s getting hungry!”, haha, so it getting hard to keep up with.
