For my first demonstration painting at the Kryolan booth at the Face and Body Art International Convention this year, I chose a design to fit the convention’s Bollywood theme. Saraswati is a goddess of knowledge, a very ancient figure of Indian mythology, named after a river. This body design is derived from a more complex one I have yet to paint, which includes some of the intricate linework of the face and body art for the Theyyam Festival in the Kerala region of India. That complexity is only alluded to here in simplified form in the face design. This body painting is done with Kryolan’s Aquacolors, including Interferenze Copper and Bronze. Continue reading →
Come see me at the Kryolan Professional Makeup booth at IMATS New York, April 14 to see the painted body illustration of this story
by Christopher Agostino
Watanabe no Tsuna was perhaps the greatest samurai of all, legendary even as a child for a strength no man had seen before. As a young man, fighting with the Heavenly Companions alongside the famous samurai Raiko, Tsuna had helped to kill Ichigumi, the Goblin Spider, throwing a giant tree down upon the back of that monstrous earth spider while Raiko fought him off in the cave beneath Kyoto castle.
One of several prints by Kuniyoshi depicting the battle
Watanabe no Tsuna had again been at Raiko’s side when he killed the Drunken Demon. Once, the Drunken Demon had once been a handsome courtier who preyed on the noble women only with his charms, but, deep in his lustful ways, as he began to drink he began to change into a true monster. He would steal the young women from the emperor’s palace, and hold them captive for his pleasure. When he grew tired of them he would eat their flesh and drink their blood to feed his demon strength. Then he kidnapped the Princess Ibaraki, and she was too beautiful to grow tired of, so he kept her alive for many years. One night in his room, perhaps to dull the pain in her heart, Princess Ibaraki joined him in his drinking and, once drunk, she tasted his feast of human sashimi. She too became a demon, though she kept her secret from the other captive maidens. When the samurai Raiko and his companions came to rescue the Princess it was fortunate that she had also drunk from the saki they had drugged to incapacitate the demon or she would have raised the alarm when Raiko came into the sleeping demon’s room and cut off his head with one swing of his sword. Tsuna saw the beautiful Ibaraki lying asleep in the demon’s bed and released her along with the other captive maidens, not knowing her terrible secret. Continue reading →
I ran into a couple of old friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday in the exhibit Storytelling in Japanese Art. In an “emaki” (handscroll) illustrating the story of “The Drunken Demon” I found the hero samurai Raiko (who I know from a folktale I tell of his battle with the Goblin Spider) andAbe no Seimei (my favorite Onmyoji, or yin/yang magician)—both in the same story like a Spiderman/Dr. Strange crossover in an issue of Marvel Team-Up.
Marvel Team-Up — Twice as Many Pages! Twice as Many Thrills!
Emaki are like the original comic books or animated movies, telling a story through text and sequential illustrations. A scroll might be 30′ long, and to read it you would look at about two feet at a time, unrolling it with your left hand while simultaneously rolling it up again with your right. “The Drunken Demon” version in the exhibit was told over three scrolls from the Edo period by Kaiho Yuchiku (1654-1728). A boyish demon becomes terrible when drunk, stealing all the beautiful women. When he captures the daughter of an aristocrat, Abe no Seimei uses his powers to find where the girl is held, and the Emperor orders Raiko and his warrior companions to rescue the girl—which they do with the help of three gods disguised as men, a tree that grows across a chasm to become a bridge, some poisoned saki and a golden helmet. In the climactic illustrations, after a wild feast featuring human sashimi, the sleeping demon is depicted as filling an entire room (described in the text as 10′ tall, but illustrated as if 30′ tall) before Raiko cuts his head off, blood spraying out in a fine mist just like in the modern samurai movies like “The Warrior’s Way” (a fun one I watched last night). Continue reading →
For my first demonstration painting at the Kryolan booth at the Face and Body Art International Convention this year, I chose a design to fit the convention’s Bollywood theme. Saraswati is a goddess of knowledge, a very ancient figure of Indian mythology, named after a river. This body design is derived from a more complex one I have yet to paint, which includes some of the intricate linework of the face and body art for the Theyyam Festival in the Kerala region of India. That complexity is only alluded to here in simplified form in the face design. This body painting is done with Kryolan’s Aquacolors, including Interferenze Copper and Bronze. Continue reading 
