‘Ink Master: Rivals’ season 5, episode 5 review: Did Tyesha Reels beat Emily Elegado?
With Tim Lees now out of the running for the title of “Ink Master: Rivals” Emily Elegado has her sights set on someone new: Tyesha Reels. Her strategy seems to be targeting people that she thinks are weaker artists rather then going after the top dogs.
Flash challenge: This week the artists are being tested on dimension and to demonstrate their talents they will be working as teams to create a design with glass and a sand blaster. Jason won the elimination tattoo last week and picked the teams and we wondered if he was going to partner up with Joshua since they’ve been working together so well this season. Instead Jason chose to work with Cleen and partnered Joshua up with Julia (who seems to have had some sort of an accident with her eyes).
Oliver Peck is off working on a tattoo convention, so we have a guest judge for the elimination tattoo: Forrest Cavacco. There were some really great designs, but the one we were most impressed by was Aaron and Don – they kept their design very simple to geometric shapes and it looked clean, however the winner of the flash challenge this week was Cris and Angel and we couldn’t have been happier to see Cris step up to the plate and take home a win after too much talk of giving up (also we just love Angel).
Elimination tattoo: Angel and Cris have Tyesha in their ear about giving Emily a tough skull this week, but they feel she isn’t a threat to win and have their sights set on who they think are stronger artists. However when Tyesha asks Angel and Chris to put her up against Emily if there’s an opportunity, we were thrilled! Tyesha wants to show Emily head to head that she is better then her and it’s really the only way that Tyesha feels she can gain some respect.
Oliver is absent for the elimination challenge as well (we miss you Oliver!) and Forrest will be judging again as they test dimension with animal tattoos. As it turns out we have the same set up as usual: two artists will go head to head tattooing the same animal and one will win and one will lose.
Angel and Cris put Joshua up against Cleen Rock One giving them the toughest animal to tattoo: The bear. Also Tyesha got her wish and went up against Emily setting the stage for great TV drama.
Angel got to pick his own canvas, but the canvas brings in a tiny photo of a horse and realizes he picked a tough canvas. Joshua gets a rib cage tattoo and once again convinces the canvas to move it, something that Jason and Angel sees as a weak move, but we have always admired Joshua for.
Judging: A few highlights: Joshua faced his first loss against Cleen, but neither tattoo was a bad tattoo: Seemed that Joshua’s artistic decision gave him the loss. Angel was able to create a very nice horse tattoo out of the tiny image his canvas gave him and he was able to beat out Ryan. Tyesha beat Emily by a mile and Emily was told that her tattoo was one of the worst of the day (a nice win for Tyesha after the tongue lashing Emily had been giving her).
Emily talks about the fact that she has been so focused on getting into people’s heads that she hasn’t focused enough on the tattooing aspect, but when Julia tells her to listen to her own advice, she goes right back into putting people (Julia) down… to which Julia replies “I still won”. Boom.
Mark (voted by the human canvas jury), Ryan and Emily are called down to the elimination room and tonight we lost Ryan.
It was great to see Emily in the bottom, not because we don’t like her or her artwork, but because she is great TV entertainment and the more fired up she is, the better TV we get. We were not at all surprised to see Emily stick around another week: Ink Master would be crazy to get rid of her. Episode grade: A –
If you are looking for more news on “Ink Master: Rivals” then head over to the link here where you can check out previews, reviews, interviews with eliminated artists (our latest ones are with Caroline Evans, Elton “LT” Duarte, Jayvo Scott and Tim Lees) and podcasts all about the show.
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Photo: Spike TV