Body Painting - Intorduction

- Body Painting goes back to tribal traditions and it still widely used today as a form of art, advertising and in competition (world body painting competition)

- It can be done with the bodies natural shapes.

- It can be done with water based paints = aqua colour or oil based paints = super colour.

Carolyn Cowan does body painting tutorials on YouTube that we focused on during the lesson. First we practiced making strong, clean lines with aqua colours .

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I did this with a large brush and used lots of paint to build up an opaque colour . I tried to make the lines as straight and neat as possible.

Next we practiced blending the colour together using different methods. We dragged one colour to the next going in the same direction, we dragged the two colours downwards to soften them into eachother and we used a sponge to stipple the two colours together

My favourite method for blending was dragging the two colours together downwards along the line as I think this gave the most even blend and was the neatest. The others became a little muddy and messy. Dragging it down gave a good blend without going to far into the other colours.

The next thing we did was practise body painting with oil-based paints. We made four squares of colour with strong neat lines again.

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We also practiced blending oil paints from white to black with an even gradient.

Another technique we practiced was layering oil paints on top of water and vice versa. The two can be layered if the underneath colurs are set ( water dried and oil based paint set with powder)

Next we looked at mixing paints with fullers earth to create textures in the body paint.

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You can mix body paint, fullers earth and flour to create a smoother texture that cracks less or just fullers earth to get the cracked effect. We also looked at drawing patters in the paint when it's wet so they are fully in the paint when dry.

This is all the different textures that I experimented with using body paint and fullers earth.

This blue section is fullers earth and flour with blue painted on top and glitter sprinkled.

This section is an underpaint of orange body paint with fullers earth and flour on top. I then drew patters in the mixture which showed the orange colour underneath.

This section is just fullers earth straight on the skin with glitter sprinkled on top which stuck to it whilst wet. Unfortunately it took too long to dry so I didn't get a picture of it with all the fullers earth completely set.

 Evaluation

Overall I am happy with the experimentation I did for body painting. I had never done it before so I wanted to practice many techniques. I liked the straight lines I did for the water and oil based paints as I think they were very neat and looked good from afar. I was also pleased with the blend from white to black as although it was difficult to get it not to smudge and to get the full gradient of greys. Next time I would like the white to be more prominent and for the black to not smudge so far into it. The other experimentation with fullers earth and paints did not look so good but I got to practice a lot of techniques. I liked the drawing patters in the fullers earth and flour mixture and the painting over of the materials to make the colour pop more.