Tag Archives: facepaint

Halloween Face Painting — Sunday: Halloween Party

Alien Belly Mouth

The freakish weather is turning this into the Halloween That Almost Wasn’t, with power outages and downed trees closing public events, so instead of painting hundreds with a team of artists at a zoo I shifted over to painting a few dozen at a Country Club. It’s a party we’ve done annually, so the staff are friendly, egging each other on to get painted, and the kids talk about what they were painted as in previous years.

Here are some of the photos of my work at the party, including some new takes on face designs I’ve been exploring throughout this Halloween season, like the Zombie Attack, and Saturday’s Zombie Eating Brains. While painting an alien onto a little kid a couple days ago I had the idea for the one here called Alien Belly Mouth — and for those of you new to painting face note that this design is essentially the same design as the Vampire Attack face, the same placement position on the face of a cartoonish figure, with just some details changed to make this basic concept into different characters.

My company artists have started to send me photos of their work over the weekend, so a gallery of their faces will be coming soon.

Vampire Attack

Zombie Attack

Demon - Goblin - Troll

Zombie Eating Brains

Zombie, on one of the waiters

Not everyone asked to be spooky...Fairies and Flowers

Sliding Home

What do you paint on a girl dressed like a hot dog?

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Halloween Face Painting — Saturday: Boo at the Zoo

Vampire Attack - With the bad weather it was a slow enough day that I had time to think of new designs to try like this variation on a figure placement we've used for other themes like aliens and sports figures.

Ice and Snow falling from the sky on a New York Halloween weekend, very unusual. And bad enough that outdoor events canceled and indoor events were under-attended.  The one good thing about days like these are that with less people to paint we can take more time with the faces and, especially, with the interaction with the people we paint. We have time for more playfulness and for working out new ideas. I was painting at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn http://www.prospectparkzoo.com/ , and as the snow began to fall very few families showed up for Boo at the Zoo — so we got to paint the zoo staff and volunteers that don’t always get a chance. Even on a bad day, facepainting is a fun job (well on most bad days, at least).
Here’s a few from today.

Werewolf Moon variation - We were using our "nice or Spooky" theme and this staff volunteer said he wanted a face that was a little of both.

Turning a Georgia Okeeffe abstract painting into a bird

Another example of our current thread of working from fine art images, taking a Paul Klee abstract landscape painting and giving it a zoo-appropriate animal theme

Sunflower, a favorite subject

A playful squirrel face to suit this volunteer's wonderful smile

Zombie Eating Brains was another idea I had while waiting for more faces to paint, and I was glad to ahve a chance to try it. I'm sure I'll paint it again tomorrow and work to fit the idea to the face better. When I painted this face, the sweet little girl who was next in lines covered her eyes, and she wouldn't take her hands down (even as Jennifer tried to paint her face) until this young man left the room.

When it was time to paint that young girl's Dad we decided his "spooky" face shouldn't be too spooky, so I left out the eyes on the eyelids trick and gave him flying ghosts instead

New Faces — Faces At Play: Face Painting images of Sports, Dance and Physical Activities

In my Transformations Facepainting company, we’ve set a goal for ourselves this year to match the way we paint faces to suit events with special themes, working to alter both the imagery we use and the style of the facepainting. It’s a way to be more supportive to the goals of these events and also a way to push ourselves into new directions. Earlier this October, we painted at the Summit Medical Group Sports and Healthy Living Fair ( http://www.summitmedicalgroup.com/about/ ), which is designed to get kids inspired to do sports and other physical activities to stay healthy. Jennifer, Britt and I decided we’d ask the kids and adults we painted about what physical activities they enjoy doing, what kind of active games they play outside or if they play any sports ‚ and then we’d turn their answer into their face design. It led to a lot of new, off-the-cuff designs. We had fun, we tried new things and learned from each other’s experiments, and we had people standing around to watch and see what new idea we’d come up with next — which is a large part of what we want to achieve with our approach to facepainting as a performance art, to make it as exciting to watch as to participate.

I was particularly taken by the work that Jennifer and Britt did. There’s a playfulness to the designs they painted that perfectly matched the “active play” concept of the Health Fair, and which seemed so appropriate to the kids we were painting. Whereas I was too concrete in my use of figures, both Britt and Jennifer let their figures bend and float on the face for a lyric, “childlike” effect — in the style of the illustrations of Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold ( www.faithringgold.com/ ), or the floating figures of a Chagall painting. Although the individual faces were quite beautiful, especially as they both use colors so well, the impact of this playful approach was best seen over the collective effect of the day’s faces, so I’ve put some of the fotos together as a slideshow.

a girl on monkey bars

Jennifer's "Swan Lake" - such a nice idea I tried it myself at my next event

One of the things I appreciate most about having a company of talented artists is the inspiration I gain working beside them. Britt painted this girl jumping rope early at the event, and I made a point of trying the idea myself so that I can remember it and use it again.

From "Tar Beach" by Faith Ringgold

  

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