Ink Master season 12 episode 9: James Vaughn, Megan Jean Morris return
As with all of the season to date, you know the drill — two veteran artists are coming into the competition to serve as coaches, with one of them hoping to come back for the finale. The theme for this week is competition and these two have an ability to create some really unique designs.
For the Flash Challenge coming up this week, we are looking at a situation where where having a great design really is key. It’s the sort of thing that can lift you to new heights, or also cause you to be stuck with some terrible skull picks after the fact. The remaining artists have to figure out a way to create a cool design using toothpicks in order to impress the judges. This feels almost like the perfect challenge to impress one Oliver Peck, who always seems to have one of them on him at every given moment. This is a tough medium to work in, though, given that they are so small and it’s hard to be able to compose anything beautiful out of them given their strange, oblong shapes.
Sometimes, we see Flash Challenges where the two teams think fundamentally similar. That’s not the case here. Instead, the women with James come up with something that is a beautiful, singular image — a tree. What brings it hope is seeing some of the roots extend off of the platform — it makes it feel more three-dimensional, like it is going off of the plane. It’s also a big design that looks nice from a distance.
If you compare this to what the men and Megan did, it’s no competition in our mind that the women have a more beautiful design. Yet, the men have something that is more creative. It’s almost a representation of the mythological tale of Sisyphus, who has to constantly push a boulder up a hill in order for it to come back down. This is representative in some ways of the struggles of a tattoo artist on this show, one who puts their all into a design only to then be critiqued heavily for it. It’s a cool idea and they do make use of a lot of space. Yet, the actual main design is somewhat minimalistic in nature.
Related News – Read our take on the most-recent episode Tuesday night
So what do the judges go for, the prettier design or the one that may have required more abstract thought? We’ll find out Tuesday…
What do you want to see on Ink Master season 12 episode 9?
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