Spotlight: Sean Cox Tattoo

Tonight's IceHL Artist Spotlight double-header begins with a prolific artist who has a unique style all his own. Sean Cox, of Sean Cox Tattoo, graced the project with three logo finalists — for the Kodiaks, Steelcats and Beasts.

  

Sean's Beasts logo was defeated and the Steelcats' logo will be revealed this week. He's hoping for victory this week when the Edmonton Kodiaks' poll is posted on Icethetics. In the meantime, I asked Sean to tell us about how he went about creating what would become his finalists.

The Edmonton Kodiaks was somewhat of a rush job. I had just discovered Icethetics a few days before the deadline so I took a drawing I already had and modified it. It's actually one of my tattoos, which was inspired by (among other things) a bear that attacked someone on the mountain I was camping on. (Bear #66, Banff National Park. She's dead now. Got hit by a train.) So really all I had to do was the wordmark — which I wanted to make look like a camp/park sign because one of my original ideas for the tattoo was to have this bear in a campground.

The Hamilton Steelcats concept was important to me because I grew up in Hamilton and a lot of my friends and family work in the steel mills. I don't know if it's obvious enough, but that's a bolt in the tiger's eye. A lot of Hamilton's sports teams have had the yellow and black so that was a no brainer. And a lot also have the tiger theme. The CFL's Ti-Cats actually used to have long skinny cages at the back of the end zones where a real tiger would pace back and forth the width of the field. They moved the tiger when the teams switched ends so it was always in the visiting team's end.

For the Boulder Beasts, I just liked the name Beasts. It made sense to have the beast made of stone (boulder). That idea made me think of Bronx from Gargoyles, so I modeled the animal after that.  The mountains in the back is an actual mountain range near the city. I think they're called the flat irons. And the secondary logo is a busted net. That was my wife's idea. There's always broken sticks or skates or pucks in logos. No one ever has a net. And nets are impossible to break so I thought that would show some balls.

www.seancoxtattoo.com

If you'd like to leave a message or question for Sean, please do so in the comments below.

We'll finish up tonight's two-parter in a little while with the artist known simply as tdog.