Body Painting

                                   Body Painting

Body painting is a form of body art. In body painting, the artist uses paint to paint directly on the model’s skin. Body painting that use the whole body of the model is called full-body painting. When only the face is being painted, it is face painting. When the body painters just focus working with the model’s hands, it’s called hand art.

Body painting, unlike other forms of body painting like tattoo or piercing, is temporary. The paint only last on the skin for a couple of hours or days at most. Small, detail body painting on a part of the body is also called “temporary tattoo”.

Full-body painting

Face painting

Hand Art

 

Brief history of body painting

Body painting is considered one of the oldest activities of our ancestors, along with group singing and dancing, stomping and drumming. On the first cave paintings which are estimated to be ten or even hundred of thousand of year-old, painting materials such as ochre and manganese dioxide were found. Some scholars assume that human ancestors use these painting materials to paint their own bodies. In tribalism cultures, forms of body painting using clays and other natural pigments existed. People painted their bodies for ceremonies such as worship or wedding.

Forms of Modern Body Painting

In this section, I will briefly talk about some forms of modern body painting that I’m interested in.

Face Painting

As the name suggested, artists of this form of body painting only focus on the face, or sometime the paint can be brought down to the neck area. Unlike makeup that women around the world use everyday to enhance their beauty, face painting using heavier paint with more vibrant colors to create different images or different emotions on the face. Face painting could cover the whole face or just a part of the face.

Hand Art

As mentioned above, hand artist only paint on the hands to made them look like different objects or animals.

Hand art by Guido Daniele

 

 

Camouflage

At the very beginning period of body painting, camouflage style is used by hunters or soldiers to help them hide themselves in forest. In the modern day, camouflage style is one of the most artistic forms of body art.

In these pictures, the models painted by artist Emma Hack blend right into the wallpapers behind them.

 

 

Fine Art Body Painting

Fine art body painting artists use the human skin as the canvas to paint real paintings. Laura Spector is one of those who combined the two categories of “body painting” and “fine art” together. She looked for 19^th century paintings of women, and recreated them by painting her male model. The creation of a women face image on a man’s face is amazing.

Fine art body painting by Laura Spector
Model: Chadwick Gray

 

 

 

 

                                                                                   Mai Tran