Friday, 9 February 2001

Body Painting Experimentation


As I had never done bodypainting before our lesson on it, I wanted to try some of my own at home to quickly get the feel of it. I tried an ivy branch which I found more difficult then expected. 




The middle leaf was the first one I did and is the one I'm least happy with. The blending round the edge isn't smooth and I found it very difficult to do the small detail in the leaf as the colors blended very easily. I was using aqua colour for this which may be why the white couldn't really be painted on top of the green. However as I went on I think my painting got a lot better and I was much more pleased with my leaves lower down, the detailing and shading transition being a lot better. Overall the branch doesn't look real but I like the effect of the look and I improved a lot whilst doing it so it was a useful experiment. Next time I would paint all the lighter colours first and use much smaller brushes for the detail.

I also very quickly tried a body paint in biro pen as this was something I'd seen in a few books and read could be used quite a lot.



This was a very quick experiment so wasn't very detailed or neat but it allowed me to see the effect of biro on the skin. It means I could do a lot finer detail than with paints which I think would be useful for a lot of pieces and it would be interesting to see how paint and pen mix in one piece. I liked being able to create a feathered, thinner line by adjusting the pressure of the pen and I think this could make interesting textures. Overall although my experiments weren't the greatest standard of makeup they helped me understand bodypainting a lot more.