tattoo Archives - The Paid to Play Podcast

Forty-two episodes! Does that mean my guest for this episode is the Answer to the Question of Life, The Universe and Everything?

Even if not, it’s great to chat with someone who’s found some pretty good answers to the Question of Getting Paid to Play – and I mean answers, plural! Ash Chain is not only monetising her hobby of cosplay through print sales at conventions, she’s also been able to get into a day job that is all about artistic expression and her personal interests: Tattooing.

Ash has already made her name in both the Brisbane ink and cosplay scenes, and just recently she made the move from the Big Smoke to Cairns, where she will be running a stall at our first ever pop culture convention, Tropicon!

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Diversification is a byword nowadays; building your life around one source of income is risky, even when you’re doing the nine-to-five. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially when your dream job simply won’t pay the bills.

Paul Abstruse has taken his love of creating comic art and built himself two income streams. The first is the one you’d expect, working for comic labels like IDW and Zenescope to produce pages for comic books.

The other is as a tattooist, where he not only creates the ink you see on folks every day; he also creates tattoos of the comic book characters we all love, even inking whole action scenes on people!

And if you’d expect a tattooist to be a very rough and ready type, you should see the art he’s created for the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic book series!

Please join me as I chat with Paul about how the Australian body art industry has changed over the last decade, the convention scene in Australia and what it means when the job you love doesn’t quite love you back.

WARNING: Due to technical issues, there are a lot of audio issues in this episode that I simply couldn’t edit out. These include background hum, keyboard noise and dog panting.