Tag Archives: Traditional

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?

http://www.agostinoarts.com

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

Japanese Demons and Team Fortress 2

In response to the previous post, my son sent me some images from a character he has in Team Fortress 2, who can acquire the Noh Mercy mask, based on a Japanese demon.

 

A note on the Team Fortress 2 official wiki http://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Noh_Mercy points out:

“The Noh Mercy appears to have been styled after the Hannya mask, often used to represent a jealous female, that becomes a demon in Japanese Noh plays.” — which happens to be a major plot point in the Onmyoji movie I like so much, though I’d say it’s more than mere jealousy that turns the the woman into a demon haunting the emperor.

 

The Noh Mercy mask is for the Spy character in Team Fortress 2, described, haiku-style as:

“Chain smoking Frenchman

Skulks in the shadows, then attacks

Terrifying mask”