Animal Surprises at the Bronx Zoo — Facepainting Gallery

Jun8

We had a team of 6 artists at the Bronx Zoo for a company’s family outing this past weekend, which gave me a chance to do some more specifically animal and nature themed facepainting then I get to do on most of my gigs these days. Although at our zoo facepainting concessions we post a list of about 40 animals for people to choose from (just a list — no photos), at our special events there we prefer to be more adventurous by surprising people with the animal we turn them in to. We ask each participant if they want to be “nice” or “spooky” and then surprise them with the transformation. Here and some of the faces I painted myself over the 4 hour event. (You can click on the photos to see the names I give the face designs.)

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.