We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful RAMON NIEVES. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with RAMON below.

RAMON, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

Currently I am blessed to be able to earn a living through my creative work, which in my case would be tattooing. The truth is that when I started tattooing I didn’t know that you could make a living from this, I come from a country (Venezuela) where the culture is quite closed with respect to art and living from art as such, for them living from art is something impossible and you grow up hearing that. So when I told my parents about my decision to dedicate myself to tattooing, this was undoubtedly one of their biggest concerns, “And now, what are you going to live on?” To their surprise, tattooing has been the only job I’ve ever done in my entire life, allowing me to grow financially.

Of course, getting to this point was quite a process because the first year was just practice at home, I practiced on myself and some friends, then I had the opportunity to go to a tattoo shop and that’s where I realized that indeed if you could live from the tattoo. So little by little I improved, getting clients, I had the opportunity to emigrate to Colombia and later to Chile where I have managed to consolidate my career, I am currently the owner of a tattoo studio “Snow Crew Studio” together with my wife and we have both managed to live from art.

I think the process went as it should, I don’t feel like I should have rushed it in any way. I think that what has helped me a lot, compared to other colleagues, is having a team, in this case my wife is a fundamental support in managing my career, so I think that working as a team can help you grow a little faster and therefore speed up the process.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name is Ramón Nieves, I am Venezuelan, from Barquisimeto specifically, and I am 27 years old. I have been tattooing for 9 years. I was 18 years old when I just took a tattoo machine for the first time, I spent almost a year at home, tattooing neighbors and friends who risked giving me their skin. That same year I also started university, I studied Civil Works Design for a few months, however my mind was still on the tattoo and I tried not to lose focus despite my other responsibilities.

I remember that it was almost a year since I started with the tattoo, when I received an invitation to work as a “tattoo artist” in a tattoo shop (Tito Tattoo Studio), without saying anything to my parents, I stopped attending the university to be able to take the chance, eventually I had to tell them my decision but by that time you could say that I was doing pretty well hahaha.

I currently live in Santiago, Chile for 5 and a half years, I own a tattoo studio “Snow Crew Studio”, a studio in which I tattoo along with other very good artists. For several years I have dedicated myself to the Black and Grey realism style and lately I have been able to work a little more on color realism, however I like to experiment and instruct myself in other styles, currently the Oriental attracts my attention a lot.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I consider that the most gratifying aspect has been marking the lives and also the skin of my clients. A tattoo session for the client is an experience, for them it is a space where they can forget about everything outside and focus only on what they are feeling at that moment. For many it even ends up being a space where they can vent, talk and express themselves without any kind of judgment, it is definitely therapeutic. I think that as tattoo artists, many times with the routine we forget that our clients are people who trust our work so much that they let us mark their skin for life and that is an honor, knowing that your works of art will be around the world and that they will always remember the day of their session is the most rewarding.

How did you build your audience on social media?

We have worked on it in a fairly organic way, our growth has been little by little but it has been quite effective, well I can say that we do not have a huge community but those who follow us are people who connect with our work and later become clients. That has been key, not focusing on quantity but on quality, because within the field I have seen how many colleagues focus so much on growing the number of followers but not their “clientele” which is something very different. I remember that the first time I filled months of agenda (I remember that we closed almost a completely full year) I had barely 6K followers on Instagram.

Instagram is our main platform, it has even been the platform with which we have managed to capture a large part of our clientele. We always try to show beyond the final result of the tattoo, to share a bit of the process that is “behind” each piece. In the end, my clients not only contact me to get a good job, they also want to live the experience.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ramonieves_/

Image Credits
Personal Photo: Gerardo Candia