From my book "Transformations! The Story Behind the Painted Faces"

by Christopher Agostino

How to use Animal Silhouttes for Face & Body Painting

photograph by Rich Johnson

At the New York Makeup Show this weekend I’ll be painting a body as a demonstration for Kryolan Professional Makeup. With the opportunity of full day for the painting and an excellent model to paint I’ve decided to re-visit a design I’ve never yet quite realized as intended, the “Animal Body”.  In 2006, I painted the design above for my book as a reference image for the pages about using silhouettes —  really more of a cheat sheet than a body design. At the Face and Body Art International Convention (FABAIC) a few weeks later I tried wrapping the animals around the body when an unexpected opportunity to paint a model came up — a more effective design, but we didn’t have enough time to complete it. I did get some nice foots of the torso, including one from Rich Johnson we’ve used as a logo image. Since then, I’ve done pieces  of it and some variations, and for the Makeup Show I’ve got a plan for the full body.

http://www.themakeupshow.com/makeupshow/NY/index.html

www.kryolan.com    http://www.fabaic.com/

Where does an idea come from? I’d done a parade of realistic animals on someone at the St. Francis Day Fair to capture the march of the animals into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan for the annual blessing of the animals.

I also used them in black silhouettes on the side of a bowl I made to commemorate my wedding with Lorraine in 1991. Later they walked around Lorraine’s belly to celebrate the coming birth of our son. Putting the animal silhouettes against a sunset came afterwards.   I’d seen a wonderful painted face with a black pterodactyl against a red sky, sent to me on a greeting card from England, and also an image of shadowy giraffes in an African sunset. So my animal parade became silhouettes against the sunset , the first time I painted it was on myself in the foto from 1992 that’s in the banner at the top of this webpage.

For a facepainter, these simplified pictures, or icons, can be used to add an animal to a scenic design. You can find source images in pictographs, pottery and painted decorations on all sorts of traditional art objects —or you can invent your own icons.

Click here for a pdf cheat sheet of animal pictographs:  AnimalSilhouettes_facepainting_agostinoarts

To simplify an animal down to an iconic symbol, use a design incorporating or exaggerating a significant feature of the animal or use a silhouette of the full animal’s shape. Most animals can be recognized by their shape: for example, a snake can be drawn as a simple S-curve line with a forked tongue, and pretty much any four legged animal shape with a long neck reads as a giraffe.

You can paint the shape of an animal in one solid color. It’s an easier, faster and often more effective way to represent an animal for a face design than a full-color, detailed approach. Most often I place animal silhouettes in black against a brightly colored background, but you can also use white animals on dark backgrounds (like dolphins in a blue ocean) or make your animal shapes in colors (like sky blue geese flying across a sunset). The body at the top of this post, the “Iconography Body” done for my book, was intended to show many of these ways I’ve been using for silhouettes on faces.

Once you can paint the silhouette you can add selected details to emphasize the significant features of an animal (like the teeth of a dinosaur), or add elements for more purely decorative effects (like putting yellow spots on a black gecko). Remember that an image doesn’t need to be realistic to communicate meaning,  you can adjust it or distort it to better fit the features and make a better design.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

From FABAIC 2006. Bodies painted by (from left to right) Nathalie Simrad, Raphaelle Fieldhouse, me and Jinny.

Related articles

• Why Body Painting? – 2: Ultimate Collaboration – MODELS, Pt.1 What I have learned from models. (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
• Why Body Painting? – 4: Radical Act – The essential celebration of our humanity / the ultimate modern art (thestorybehindthefaces.com)
• Why Body Painting? – 2: Ultimate Collaboration – MODELS, Pt.2: Just how much a model can help, Amber and Kuniyoshi at FABAIC 2011 (thestorybehindthefaces.com)