Animals On Faces — #animalsIDIC Facepainting Gallery

#AnimalsOnFaces #animalsIDIC — Approaching the face as a canvas and placing an image of the animal onto the face using the inherent shapes of the face. In creating designs to use the curved, living canvas that is a face, I start with exploring where can I place the key element(s) of the animal to create a design that fits the shapes of the face I’m painting and/or allows the wearer to animate the design by using their eyes or mouth. Years of turning people into animals at the Bronx Zoo gave me lots of opportunity to experiment with creating a variety of different faces for the same animal: moving animal images around the face to see where they fit; changing the scale of the images; applying different artistic styles; thinking about creating scenic designs, paintings and graphic images rather than mask-like faces. I’ve collected examples from the past couple decades, starting with my favorites in the top block.

: Rhino

: Tiger Leaping Up

: Tiger Gets Loose

: Horse Falling Leaves

: Frog Mouth

: Crocodile Descending

: Crocodile Mouth

: Dragon Fire

: Lemur (Other Eye)

: Bird (Other Eye)

: Flock of Birds

: Flock of Geese

: Eagle

: Hawk Mask

: Fish Nose

: Magic Goldfish

: Fish Mouth

: 2 Flamingos

: Giraffe Loosing Spots

: Giraffe Pop

: Baby Gorilla

: Festival Elephant

: Lizard Nose

: The Two Lizards

: Night Heron

: Nile Crocodile

: Nuba – Ostriches

: Gazelle Looking Back

: Octopus

: Parrot Sunset

: Pelican Diving

: Pollination

: Rhino

: Shark and Swimmer

: Shark and Swimmer

: Snake Mouth

: Snake Mouth

: Snake Priestess

: Snow Leopard

: Cheetah Sun

: Squirrel

: Stegosaurus

: Large Tiger

: Tiger Gets Loose

: Pegasus

: Horse Spirit Mask

: Sea Turtle

: Turtle Smile

: The Earth Turtle

: Evolution

: Zebra Gets Loose

: Zebra Nose

Combinations

Multiple images of animals. Taking a graphic approach in the first examples to confuse the perception of the underlying face and create illusions.

Examples from Transformations

For my book, Transformations, I drew on years of events at the Bronx Zoo , including special thematic weekends such as Spots and Stripes, or Hidden Animals, that I could use to develop new designs. Working as teams of artists at those public events in which we’d paint hundreds of people, I saw the value in developing a wide range of design techniques, to create different faces for each participant so that each face remained interesting in a crowd of painted faces, and each person painted had their own unique experience. Photos mostly from 2000-2006, a few are older: