:)

Recently I have the fun to tattoo Wonka and Dave Marshall in Bern upon invitation from my dear friend Patrick Fraefel who happens to be PR for Gorilla Bicycles. A few days later (or was it before? Who cares?) Wonka, Patrick, RENAUD SKYRONKA and Corinne Stoll shot a series of pictures to be featured in the upcoming issue of sang bleu. I was also given (ok, my chronology is messed up, cause THAT was 4 months prior) a beautiful fixed gear bike that have since been upgraded up to that:

And here is a little behind the scenes video of the shoot. As much as I am impressed by the stuff Wonka does, I am not even remotely interested in using my bike to jump over stuff, but I must say, nor am I interested in riding normal bikes anymore since I discovered fixed gear cycling!

(you might wanna turn the volume off before playing the video ;) )

GOrilla – Playing with Fire from Gorilla Bicycles on Vimeo.

For more than 10 days now we have been literally trapped in our studio, working all of our awake-hours. 616 pages to lay out is a serious amount as you can guess. Add to that the fact that I have been making hardly any kind of graphic design in the past year as the production work took most of my time. It means that within a month and a half since we started working on the layout, I had very little brain space and time available to post here. And it will be like this till the 7th, day on which we will deliver the files to the printer.

In the meanwhile I count on those of the SB crew who find themselves less busy to keep this blog alive. And, jsut for the hell of it, here is the 20th version of the cover… Which will change until the very last hour, I guess…

As for now: photography by Julia Champeau, Styling by Mauricio Nardi. Model: Cedric)

Shot by Alexis Zavialoff.
A preview in SB5, used as illustration of Alex Binnie’s “Raw Power” article, but a full feature on Blut & Eisen will be published in SB6!

For the upcoming double-300-page-volume upcoming fifth issue of sang bleu, Alex Binnie—whom I consider a kind of spiritual guide—wrote me a stunning essay on the power of tattooing. “Raw Power” it is entitled. To illustrate it our Adrian Wilson shot a series of people tattooed by Into You’s Thomas Thomas. :)

Upper right leg by Taz, lower right by Xed. Left leg by Mara’s own hand.

Mara’s top half is in Sang Bleu 5.