Storytelling and body painting

We often hear comments from our clients about how different the style of our body painting from what they see elsewhere (primarily when they google body painting).

Then we normally proceed to tell them that it’s really not about style, which is the choice of visual language to use, but it’s more about the purpose of what we do that’s different.

The popular uses of the body as medium, which is known as body painting, are to either transform the model into a character or to create some sort of illusion.

In the transformative type of body painting, the model becomes a different character. This is the kind of body painting that’s very popular for Halloween or ComiCon.

The illusion type of body painting, the body paint is used to fool the eye. The popular types of illusions are the painted clothes and disappearing people.

In both types of body painting mentioned above, the model(s) disappear hidden behind the paint.

Although sometimes we do those as part of our business, the main type of body painting that we do is for storytelling.

So instead of transforming the model into another character or making her disappear, we use body painting to tell her story.

The way we see body painting is that the painting is what’s going on inside of the model’s soul. Since this is her story, we want her to be recognizable. This is why in most of our work, we don’t paint the face.