Body and Face Painting: Festival Painting

Hello Art aficionados!

Once again body and face painting is the hot topic of the hour. The focus this time is decoration of the body and face for festivals. This particular context for body painting is one of interest to me as it provides a safe place to be expressive, artistic and always crazy with your designs. During festivals is perhaps the most socially acceptable time we can be a little Avant-garde in society, so of course creating art using your body and face as the canvas would seem the obvious choice! 

Coming from someone who loves body painting, I would of course love to see a world of people wearing body art in the most unusual of circumstances. Perhaps fashioning a floral face motif at their local grocer or even painting their face just to visit their grandma. But for now festivals, fairs and community events are the perfect medium for showing what one can do with their paint brushes and body paint. 

Some great painting ideas that are simple and always trending are simple shapes, flowers, swirls lots of fluro colour and geometrical shapes. Below is an example of a quick 5 minute design using just triangles and fluro body paint to paint some friends for a music festival. As you can see the design’s intent was to be quick, colourful and allow for the subjects to 'stand out in the crowd'.

The above design is more for modern day festivals however this week I was on the pursuit to re imagine a design for a festival in the 60s or 70s like Woodstock. Creating something inspired by 'flower power' was most certainly helped by the fact I was wearing a 60's dress with a psychedelic print on the day (seen in the mid section). This was the inspiration and reference for the choice of colours, as you can see with the   yellows, green, red and white hues. I have also created orange with the combination of red and yellow to create another element. This little inspirational body work focuses on colour, shape and line, using triangles, dashes, dots and swirls , and showing off their potential as a funky 60s body print. 

Here is just an extra suggestion, if anyone ever does go to their grocer with face paint or perhaps has a body paint dinner party, post your photos, we love seeing art mediums being transferred into different contexts. 

Happy Creating!