Tag Archives: #transformationsNY

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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Animals On Faces — #animalsIDIC Facepainting Gallery

#AnimalsOnFaces #animalsIDIC — Approaching the face as a canvas and placing an image of the animal onto the face using the inherent shapes of the face. In creating designs to use the curved, living canvas that is a face, I start with exploring where can I place the key element(s) of the animal to create a design that fits the shapes of the face I’m painting and/or allows the wearer to animate the design by using their eyes or mouth. Years of turning people into animals at the Bronx Zoo gave me lots of opportunity to experiment with creating a variety of different faces for the same animal: moving animal images around the face to see where they fit; changing the scale of the images; applying different artistic styles; thinking about creating scenic designs, paintings and graphic images rather than mask-like faces. I’ve collected examples from the past couple decades, starting with my favorites in the top block.

Combinations

Multiple images of animals. Taking a graphic approach in the first examples to confuse the perception of the underlying face and create illusions.

Examples from Transformations

For my book,  Transformations, I drew on years of events at the Bronx Zoo , including special thematic weekends such as Spots and Stripes, or Hidden Animals, that I could use to develop new designs. Working as teams of artists at those public events in which we’d paint hundreds of people, I saw the value in developing a wide range of design techniques, to create different faces for each participant so that each face remained interesting in a crowd of painted faces, and each person painted had their own unique experience. Photos mostly from 2000-2006, a few are older:

Additional Designs

Up through 2016. I’ll be posting a separate Gallery of Animals On Faces 2017 as the photos start coming in.

Learn more all we do at: agostinoarts.com

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VIDEO: StoryFaces at Jackson Storyfest

Just returned from Jackson, MI where I took part in the 30th annual Jackson Storyfest, part of a herd of storytellers who were in area schools performing for over 15,000 students May 3-5, 2017.

Special thanks to Bart Hawley and his crew from JTV who came to film StoryFaces at Parkside — and who was  brave enough to be transformed himself for Punia and the King of the Sharks. On Friday night, I was the featured teller for an evening performance at a beautiful old theatre currently under renovation, the Michigan Theatre, and it is a rare pleasure for me to perform in such a classic theatre. My thanks also to Anthony and Steven at the theatre, who could not have been more welcoming.

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