Tag Archives: face painting

Art and Stories Show for Libraries 2025

Presenting a creative adventure in art through stories and painted faces designed to encourage and inspire young artists, with fantastic, colorful folktales like The Rainbow Bat and The Power of the Jaguar; original tales like The Amazing Face Story and Picasso the Thief; plus fun bits of tales from the lives of famous artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Matisse and Monet.

In addition to folktales and original stories, this summer’s show includes material from my arts-in-education program Talking Art — exploring origins, inspirations and appropriations from the history of art, including the fundamental questions of what is art and why do we make it?

Featuring my 5’ x 8’ painting depicting the panoramic history of transformation in art, from Cave Walls to Andy Warhol, plus a D.I.Y. activity for parents and kids to do after the show in which they design a symbolic animal mask using traditional concepts that go back to the origins of art.

From a wide repertoire of stories I select tales to suit each new audience, and to be sure to perform new tales if I’ve been to your library before. A typical performance runs 60 minutes, with 4 or 5 stories involving 5 – 10 volunteers being facepainted onstage as I tell my tales. Like a magician would do, I pick volunteers from the audience to be part of the show onstage while I am also engaging the full audience with my storytelling and additional audience involvement. The content is targeted towards school aged kids and family audiences, including toddlers is ok. I bring a sound system, require no special equipment, and comfortably perform for small groups or audiences of up to 250.

Please contact me with any questions, or to schedule a performance.

Email to: info@agostinoarts.com

For a reference, please contact your colleagues at one of the tri-state libraries I performed at in 2024: 

Clifton, NJ • North Bergen, NJ  •  East Granby, CT  •  Rockville Library, Vernon, CT  •  Plattekill, NY  •  Bronxville, NY   •  Wyckoff, NJ • Cranford, NJ  •  Sayreville, NJ  •  Mattituck and Laurel Libraries, NY  •  Warren County Libraries, NJ  •  Hamilton Township, NJ  • Deer Park, NY  •  Sayville, NY  •  Patchogue-Medford, NY  •  Long Beach, NY  •  Centre Moriches, NY  •  Cresskill, NJ   

Christopher Agostino’s StoryFaces  is an exciting storytelling show in which I paint the faces of audience volunteers to illustrate the stories as I tell them, captivating the audience with my uniquely animated tales. It is an unusual show, with this unique combination of stories and visual art, so you might also want to watch the video: 

  See the video: What Is A StoryFace?

——   ALSO AVAILABLE for the Color Our World Theme ——

a banner image composed of 7 photographs of faces painted as recognizable art by famous painters, with the text reading Art On Your Face

Our Transformation Facepainting artists can turn your guests into living works of art for library events, re-creating recognizable paintings by famous artists and original designs inspired by fine art. You will be amazed at the quality of the faces and how quickly we paint them — these are all examples of faces painted on guests at events. 
Contact us for more information or to schedule an artist, and see the faces at the Art On Your Face Gallery.

a montage of photographs from StoryFaces performances

Christopher Agostino’s StoryFaces

Facepainting Basics — How to Paint a Tiger Face

2/19/18 #transformationsny

I am re-posting this set of instructions for a tiger face as I get ready for my class in Facepainting Basics at Kryolan City NY on February 22. We’ll start with this simple design as an understanding of how to turn the human face into an animal mask. It’s such a basic starting place for any facepainter, I have a memory of copying a lion design out of a theatrical makeup text book (Richard Corson’s “Stage Makeup” maybe?) onto someone’s face at a Halloween event in Los Angeles around 1980, as I tried to work out what the book said about how to place the lines and use shading to change the shape of the human face. This type of design is the most direct form of mask-like facepainting, in which you directly transform the human features into the animal features, i.e. the human eyes become the tiger’s eyes, the human nose becomes the tiger’s nose, etc. The underlying formula has not changed since then for me, only the style has as, over the years, I synthesized the naturalistic shadings and linework of that theatrical makeup into this more graphic tiger mask design.  In this simplified style it’s quick to paint, makes a strong colorful impact and looks good from a distance — all of which are desirable qualities in face designs for big crowds at large events.

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Here’s my simplest tiger face, a very basic approach to what is probably the most popular animal face, adapted from my book, Transformations . Just two sponge colors and black. I took the step-by-step fotos in this example as I painted a guest at an event in 2005. The makeup used is Kryolan Aquacolors, a water-based theatrical makeup, which I prefer for its bright colors and simple application. About the Makeup

 

Step 1 – Orange — Start with a sponge and orange cake makeup for the base color. Leave the skin exposed on the eyelids and around the mouth where you will put in the yellow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 2 – Yellow — I use a large, round sponge to apply my cake makeup. By squeezing the working area of the sponge between my thumb and fingers I can control the shape it makes to put the yellow almond shape of a cat’s eye onto the eyelids. By adjusting the size and shape of the eyes you can change the demeanor of the cat: large eyes are cute and kittenish, while narrower eyes can be made sinister. Yellow also goes over and beneath the lips for the whisker areas. When I am working quickly I don’t take a lot of time to blend my colors together, but I can make variations in tone by stippling the yellow over the orange. My sponges have an open texture so if I gently touch them to a face I can quickly stipple on some color to create highlights and a furry texture.

 

Step 3 – Black — Finally, the black line work. The essential methodology of my fast event faces is strong black line work over brightly colored bases. I’ll use a black liquid makeup loaded onto a #8 round brush when working at my quickest. Eyes first, so they can set a bit while I finish the rest. Iconic cat eyes, with a vertical line for the pupil, also have the advantage that they don’t smear if wet when you open your eyes (like a rounded pupil does). A tiger’s face and nose are longer than ours, so you need to create an illusion to help change the shape of the human face to be more tiger-like. For the nose: paint an upside down black triangle extending below the human nose to make it look longer. Beside the nose, draw a line down from the corner of each eye to the nose you made and shade that line out a bit under the eye with the edge of your brush, to make the human nose seem wider. Add the distinctive line cats have from the nose to the lips. Then paint just the bottom lip black (not the top lip at all) to help complete a visual illusion that makes the whole whisker area jut forward. Support this illusion with the curve of the lines extending out from the sides of the bottom lip, and with “fur” lines on the chin framing the yellow patch. For whiskers I use dots (because I think they read better than little lines which can look like stripes in the wrong place.) Add dynamic black stripes and the tiger is done.

For examples of how this basic design can generate many variations in a tiger face, see the post “Tiger Variations“

Learn more about all we do at: agostinoarts.com

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Favorite Faces 2017 — Facepainting Gallery

January 11, 2017

#favoritefaces2017   #transformationsny

Starting here with some of my favorite playful faces of the year and examples from Art On Your Face events, followed by faces from StoryFaces performances at festivals, schools and libraries. Below is a second set of photos with more cartooning explorations, animal faces, Halloween and holiday faces.

 

During events I mostly take photos of faces related to designs and techniques I’m working on, so I’ll have records of multiple versions of faces like the “Eaten By…” ones to refer to as I develop them further. This year included continuing to play with putting a cartoon of someone onto their own face, like in the “Smile”  faces, plus cartoons of people as vampires and zombies. Our company project in 2017 was to create “Animals on Faces”, using the face as a canvas (rather than as a mask), like in the “3 Giraffes” or “Rainbow Macaw” faces. And throughout the year I worked to think more like a painter as I painted faces. Fueled by the artface explorations we do, I work to put what I learn from copying artists like Matisse and Modigliani into all the facepainting, to include qualities related to using the Aquacolor make-up more like a painter might: exploring surface effects, for example, like in the four “Alien” faces here.

Learn more about all we do at: agostinoarts.com

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