40 Years of #FunOnFaces

My Anniversary Gallery of 2016

2016 was my 40th year of painting faces, from a start as an apprentice with a theatre company painting volunteers as clowns for a bi-centennial parade in 1976, and it’s taken that long for me to begin to figure out how to really have some #funonfaces by incorporating cartooning and pictures of people on their own faces. The recent cartoon explorations have been driven by my need to add comedy to my StoryFaces performances (see The Amazing Face Video ), and also to develop new design tools for creating theme-specific faces, which we do to keep the facepainting an adventure while giving clients a reason to hire us for interesting events (see galleries: Science On Your Face and Winter Olympics ). Here’s 2016 in faces, starting with a group of some of the more playful, #funonfaces ones, plus groups of new StoryFaces images, continuing explorations of Art On Your Face and other types of faces. Fotos first, at the bottom some more text.

Learn more about StoryFaces and all we do at: agostinoarts.com

: Supergirl Smile

: Superwoman NYC

: Secret Identity…

: …revealed

: 4th of July Noseface

: Eaten By Dragon

: Eaten By Dinosaur

: Chased by Cyclops

: If pigs had wings…

: Flying On Eagle

: Alien Big Face

: The Hills are Alive…

: Opera Singer

: You Are Chosen!

: Beautiful Day Smile

: The Acrobats

: Cat On Her Mind

: Swiss National Day

: The Alps

: Alphorn

: Swiss Cheese Thief

: William Tell’s Son

: Butterfly Girl

: Eaten By Shark

: Chased by Ghosts

: Chased By Dinosaur

: Mouth Monster

: Circus Star

: Animal Celebration

Faces from StoryFaces performances 2016:

: StoryFaces images…

: Buffalo Dancer

: Punia

: Arm of the Demon

: The Goblin Spider

: The Spider Woman

: Monkey King

: Eagle Shaman

: The Flight

: The Fall

: The Storyteller

: The Storyteller…

: …and the Magic Fish

: Ready To Perform

: Happily Ever After

Art On Your Face and other themes 2016:

: 4th of July NYC

: Okeeffe

: Cezanne

: Van Gogh

: Chagall

: Red Grooms Exhibit

: Red Grooms – Lincoln

: Red Grooms

: Red Grooms

: Red Grooms

: Dali

: Derain

: Klee – Heroic Roses

: Klee – Heroic Roses

: Matisse

: Matisse

: Matisse

: Matisse

: Matisse

: Matisse

: Matisse

: Miro

: Monet

: Monet

: Monet

: Okeeffe

: Chauvet Cave

: Giraffe Pop

: Sculptured Face

: Cheetah Pop

: 3 Cheetahs

: Shark Attack

: NY Dental Conference

: Alien

: Red Kabuki

: Grim Reaper

: Medusa

: Ghoul

: Zombie

: Vampire Girl

: Vampire’s Bite

: Winter Wonderland

: Happy Present

: Singing Angel

: NYC Christmas

: Dreaming of White Christmas

: Abominable Snowman

: Elf Nose

: Santa Nose

This year included more fun on faces than usual, as I experiment with cartooning to make faces people can play with at events, and to animate faces in my StoryFaces shows. We surprise people with what we paint on them at events, usually just asking the participant if they want to be “nice or spooky” and then surprising them. To accommodate these kind of faces we are offering a new, third option of becoming funny-looking, and then put a cartoon of them on their face. We also had a few Art On Your Face events this year, including painting faces for a Red Grooms exhibit at the Hudson River Museum and at the Sculpture Center’s LIC Block Party, plus a number of circus themed promotional events.

The animation of the face designs is entering my new StoryFaces pieces also, both in the faces I paint on stage and in the performance style. I started the year working on “Monkey King, Yo!” for performance at the StoryCrossroads festival in Utah, and ended the year premiering a new story called “The Storyteller and the Magic Fish” in which I paint a picture of myself onto an audience volunteer.

Special thanks to the participant/victim who let me use his face for the general amusement of the crowd at First Night Morristown, to create the Happy New Year “FaceCard” ™ at our final gig of the year for the gallery’s final image.

Learn more about StoryFaces and all we do at: agostinoarts.com

Li Chi Slays the Dragon — from Bodies Alive!

Feb23

See the video: Li Chi Slays the Dragon from Bodies Alive!

An ancient Chinese legend brought to life on painted bodies.

Li Chi Slays the Dragon is one of the stories I tell most frequently. Mostly as a StoryFace, illustrating the tale on the face of one volunteer as I tell it, but, once upon a time, I had the chance to expand the story onto a cast of performers as a tale told with painted bodies. This video is from that performance at the Face and Body Art International Convention in 2008, as part of the Bodies Alive! show we presented there. I was joined in the painting by Christina Davison, Sara Glasgow, and Jennifer Wade, with help from some volunteers, and in performance by Blair Woodward, Cully Firmin, Rebecca Reil and Chloe Agostino. See my StoryFace version of Li Chi live at PIFA. Learn about the Bodies Alive Show. Learn about BodyStories.

My specific inspiration for how to take a legend like this and turn it into a sequence of images on painted bodies came from a puppet show I saw at the New Victory Theatre by Ping Chong, adapting to the stage Japanese ghost stories from the classic movie Kwaidan. Ping Chong’s stage design re-created a cinematic style, varying the size of the puppets and the perspective of the settings he placed them in to do closeups, or long shots or tracking shots, to tell the story sequentially — like in a movie.

The development process included sketches of the body designs which I scanned and then moved around in photoshop to create a rough storyboard, plus some color and design tests done in the course of my regular facepainting gigs. To help the performers understand the visuals that their painted bodies would create on stage, I sketched the designs onto T-shirts for them to wear during rehearsals. Included here are the studio photos taken at FABAIC by Rich Johnson, plus some of the other images created during the process, and since.