Bogwater Taffy Blog

Hey I'm Casey :) Thanks for making it to my website!

I am an artist and fabricator living in Chicago IL. My work is mainly tattooing, puppetry, and printmaking, which you'll find dedicated pages for in the sidebar.

I am also really interested in the prospect of existing on the web as a social space outside of the main social media leviathans, so this blog is going to be my little experimental exercise in that: the aggregation point for absolutely everything that I want to share, including all of my main business things but also including passing fancies and side projects, as well as hopefully the occasional personal post and life update. I'm hoping to eventually connect the posts I make here to an RSS feed and flesh out a cool links page to other friends and artists in the community who are doing the same, both within and outside Chicago.

My email, for art commissions, questions about my website, and general correspondence is: bogwatertaffy@gmail.com .

My hope for this blog is that it'll eventually become a relatively usable, searchable archive of my work and other interests. I don't really have the coding chops yet to figure out an actual tagging system that will sort posts out to various different webpages with clickable links, BUT luckily the command F find function is built in to your computer, so if I include unique searchable tags with my posts, you can search them on this page and click through all the different posts related to that term.

Here are the major ones, but I'll also try and include relevant descriptors in the caption of posts, so you'll be able to say, find a tattoo of an octopus by searching "octopus".

--> Tattoo related: tattooflash, freshtattoo, healedtattoo, colortattoo, stickandpoke, abstracttattoo, blackandgrey, tradtattoo

--> Other arts: artprocess, printmaking, puppetry, puppetryprocess, puppetrypics (for stage photos), and artsandcrafts (other types of art I do less frequently than puppet, print, and tattoo)

--> AND other business entirely: personposting (life updates and other etcetera), eventflyers (advertisements for events), internetmedia (coding or website related).

As I begin to both post current work and also fill in the backlog, I will make two-plus posts at a time, and link back and forth from the backdated one I do that day to the most current post. This will largely be for my own organizational entertainment, but it means you, if you choose, will be able to run back the beginning of my art and tattoos college til now with me. It's honestly kind of fun and novel to do it on a site like this where theres absolutely no way to gauge engagement stats. Read that shit if you wanna! The very first post is my first tattoos ever.

WAHOOO my first post of what I'm actually doing in relatively real time!!! There are several posts today because my flight to Vermont to go hang out at Bread and Puppet is later than I thought (boo) so I am enjoying some quality airport time.

Here are some full color tattoos, which means color fill/shading and color lines. I'm really excited about working more in both of these styles and find them a bit hard to categorize further than just like, colorful. I like the simple and flat color of Abby's suns a lot, and red lines I already know hold up fairly well. I am also really excited to see Tasha's abstract piece heal up-- you may not be able to fully see it in the fresh pictures but the linework is a deep violet purple rather than black.

Today's backdated post: prints from college

Tags: freshtattoo, colortattoo, abstracttattoo, tradtattoo

The page you're reading looks a bit like this as I edit it:

It is hosted on neocities, which is more or less a modern mirror of 1990s project GeoCities. It uses mostly HTML as well as a CSS stylesheet to provide unified style elements across pages. I am learning both as I go!

Updating it is not so hard because I am able to save a little template post for when I want to make a new post, but it is somewhat more difficult than posting to social media. The tradeoff, as usual, is slight decrease in user-friendliness for increased independence and control. I currently find this a fun and enjoyable challenge.

If you are my friend or another artist I know in Chicago and you're interested in making a website too I am happy to share the small amount I know! We can link eachother's pages :-)

Today's backdated post: more of my first stick-and-pokes (I'll link back to this one so you can keep scrolling in order!)

Tags: personposting, internetmedia

Before I started tattooing I studied printmaking -- my documentation was shoddy at best but here are a few that I do have from that era. RIP studio access... I would love to do etching specifically again but the infrastructure needed is no joke.

Houses, multiple layered woodblocks using lasercut paper screens to block layers.

puppies, copperplate etching with chine-colle.

No Pride, Screenprint.

houses, copperplate etching. Better photo someday maybe, I think I still have this somewhere.

Best Friends, large ~3x5' jigsaw woodcut, printed with steamroller for a dia de los muertos festival :)

Back to the top: Abby & Tasha's color work

Tags: printmaking

Here's a bunch more of baby's first handpokes! I got the hang of it pretty quickly and started exploring color fill and red lines. Most of these are still pretty much on myself or close friends.

Back up to today's post about coding

This will be the first post I make to this blog, and will set a bit of a standard to how I actually organize things. For backdated posts like this one I will put the date the originals were made, which might be a range, as well as the date posted to this page. They will all end up in reverse chronological order eventually, but I've yet to decide how I'll handle rollout of "new" backdated posts once theyre buried under a mountain of more current material. Maybe I'll just link them in whatever top-of-page post is posted the same day.

These are a few of my first ever tattoos on human skin other than my own. They are all on people who generously trusted me, a few of whom I'm still best friends with and see all the time, and a few of whom I was very close with at the time, but whose paths have diverged since. Seven years seems like both a lifetime and no time at all.

I'm going to resist the urge to cram even more photos into one post, since the current material will likely be basically one-post-one-tattoo and I don't want to totally compress this part of my life even though it was like, college and then straight into covid era since I graduated 2020 and thus feels mad compressed already.

link back up to the tagging post if that's where you came from :)

Tags: freshtattoo, stickandpoke, personposting