I'm Shylha and the name is a mix of English, Tibetan and Latvian. It means “the shy deity” and is also my Latvian name, at least phonetically. It may sound surprising, but as a child I was really considered “shy”. I just wanted to be by myself - and just draw. When I was four, I started school in the art class at the Kreativhaus Münster, which I attended for 12 years. Drawing and painting were the greatest things for me from day one, and I would have liked to have started art even earlier.
FINELINE
I can still remember being told for the first time when I was six that I was “too perfectionistic” when it came to drawing, when in fact I only had a meticulous attention to aesthetic details. When I was fifteen I got a sketchbook and started working in it with fineliners. When I saw the results, it was like love at first sight because I saw all the tattoos in front of me and in that moment I knew where I had to go.
REALISTIC
My next art school when I was sixteen was the Adolph Kolping vocational college - and it's amazing that Wilde Tinte and Nawang_Rin were already students there. At the same time I tried to get hired in various tattoo studios, but I had no luck. So I continued to spend nights filling sketchbooks with portraits and looking for an internship. At the age of 18 and two weeks, I had my first tattoo done and the Lha Ma Yin studio was recommended to me. Then everything happened very quickly, an interview at Nawang-Rin, six months of half-day internship plus a two-week school internship and on my last day of the internship the big surprise: Nawang-Rin offered me a training position at Lha Ma Yin.
ABSTRACT
When I was twenty I started working as a tattoo artist there. My favorites are fine line realism and abstract, but my quiet passion is portraits - I want to do a lot more of them.