♦ Sketchpages V ♦ Justus Tattoos Update ♦

The second time I'm changing Justus' tattoos this year lmao, but I swear I'm gonna try to make this the final version :,D

A totally random fun fact but Justus is only like a year or two younger than Rick haha

 They are nearly the same age (the top sketches are how he looked back when he first met, so a lot younger, but the bottom one is from when they were both like nearly fifty). Justus just allowed himself to age gracefully because he didn't fucking stress himself out like it's an Olympic sport, unlike the scruffy lookin' fella whose bad habits he kept enabling T.T

Justus also didn't emote like at all, so significant wrinkles didn't even have the chance to form

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Some background about his tattoo evolution for those of you who haven't been with us back in 2022 haha

Justus used to have those line facial tattoos on both of his cheeks. They were supposed to represent people he had lost in the business that were very dear to him, including a little empty line tattoo that symbolized the loss of his young associate Ace who got killed by one of the corrupt policemen working for the NRPD (which is how Justus and Rick originally met).

The problem with the lines was that they were incredibly inconvenient to animate. They floated around his face and were just pretty tedious to work with. During my research, I have also found examples of facial line tattoos indigenous cultures have used for a long time, and since Justus isn't of indigenous descent, I wanted to respect their traditions and didn't want to make them way too similar to theirs, which would have happened if I tried to make them easier to animate. And thus, the "ace of hearts" tattoo was born, which was the latest design until like today haha, and the ones you guys have seen here. And again, I solved no issue hahah it still floated around his face and annoyed me to no end even during these few short scenes I finished lately.

I ended up finally giving up on the facial tattoos and opted instead to put that heart with a little A tattoo dedicated to his late associate on his neck, which flows better with the rest of his tattoos and is IMMENSELY easier to animate because the lines are much closer connected to his neck, so I have things to kinda refer to when I animate him.

And here we are now haha

Justus is one of my favorite characters from the books and the tattoo issue has been eating me up for like 2 years, which is why I so rarely drew him, so it was time to let go. The line tattoos were cool and all, but man they gave me one too many headaches

I gotta say that this is the first time I genuinely felt super comfortable drawing him, so I believe it was a good change <3 I updated the website designs and the few works that are unpublished yet, so the new animation is gonna have this new tattoo as well