Body painting has been around for thousands of years with the use of clay
and other natural pigments often in ceremonies and used by almost every
tribe of people from around the world and this in a way has led to the use of
modern cosmetics and makeup but on a much more conservative scale. Since the
1960's there's been a revival of body painting due in part of a
changing attitude to how we view the body in mainstream media from fine art
painting to face painting, cospainting to optical illusions in this video we'll
look at the work of five incredible body painting artists. Probably one of the
most well-known artists working in this area is Craig Tracy from New Orleans in
the United States. Craig has been an artist from childhood from when he was
given be creative freedom and encouragement to follow his passions by
his parents who could at best be described as working-class hippies. His
early years were filled with drawings and paintings but he was when he got an
airbrush from his parents for his 15th birthday it's set him on his way forward
he was going to do for the next 20 years.
Craig said that it was when he painted his first face but it really clicked
with him and later he realized he'd fallen in love with body painting though
it took him a further 5 or 6 years before he took the subject seriously.
Through using the internet he discovered other artists for he admired and study
their work and then developed his own ideas this led to his first series of 15
Pieces called the "Nature Series" which was well received and some of the pieces
became iconic works in their own right and Craig has become one of the leading
artists in this field.
Craig uses a combination of background images and the models themselves to
create an image were the model provides the outline but otherwise almost
disappears from the painting as in the Tiger and the Leopard from the "Panted Alive"
series but the more we are amazed by the quality of the work
work, the more mind-boggling the fact is that from the age of 3
Craig has gradually been going blind with a degenerative eye condition which means he has almost no
depth perception, is extremely short-sighted and has an astigmatism so
his vision is distorted, none of which you would believe when you see the quality of
his work which is now described as the first fine art body painting in a world.
Where most of the things which see online have been digitally altered in
some way or another or even completely digitally created, Japanese artist Choo San (Hikaru Cho)
and bring us body art which looks like he's being created on a computer
but in fact it is all hand painted without computer insight. Cho San started her
drawing with doodles of eyes she drew on the back of our hands during study breaks as
an art student at the Musashino Art University in Tokyo Japan. She became
bored with all the digitally created and altered imagery and decided to see
how far she could go by painting her ideas directly on to real models rather
than photoshopping photos of them. The results of her body paintings using just acrylic
paints are not only very realistic but also rather unsettling sometimes with
misplaced eyes and mouths, zippers, laces and buttoned up body parts. Cho San now
makes a living selling products with her innovative designs on the web.
Nikki Shelly came to prominence for her face painting after gaining a large
following on Facebook Her horrifying paintings have launched a 34 year old
mum from Rugby in United Kingdom to a level of fame she never believed
possible. It all started out when she did some Halloween face painting for her
kids, she received a lot of comments on how good they were. As time went by the
kids got bored with the face painting so she started to paint her
own face and it was then she discovered home newfound love of horror makeup. In
many of the designs her face is barely visible underneath all the detail that
is incredibly intricate with
sharp menacing teeth and skin flaking off in many of her works she's against a
black background which when combined with a blacked-out eyes, mouth and skull
parts makes her look very scary indeed, much more than the Halloween ones she
did her kids. Kay Pike uses body paint to transform her model looks to that of
comic book heroes and villains in what she called Cospainting, a variation on
the Cosplay theme. The 28 year old model and designer now has over 12,000
fans on Instagram and now live streams her creations from start to finish which
can take up to 15 hours and cost up to $150 for just the paint alone. Kay's work
includes popular comic book characters including Superman, Spider-man, Iron Man,
Robin from Batman as well as cult figures from the world of Marvel and Japanese
manga. Originally a fan of dressing up for Cosplay Events, Kay discovered that she
could use her artistic skills and transform her appearance with paint
instead of clothing. After posting the initial results online she soon found
she had thousands of followers. She only started painting herself in December
2015 and it was after she did a face painting version of "Attack on Titan", a
character with a skinless body that it went viral and she was invited to stream
painting live online where she has been doing a body painting live stream on
TwitchTV twice a week ever since. Although Kay has only been been practicing body
painting for the past few months, she has always been interested in art. Kay was a
fine art painter long before she tried her hand Cospainting. She said that
she's slowly been learning how to paint herself by trial and error as it was a
much more difficult medium to work on as the body paint don't
behave in at all the same way as canvas paint do. After she finished painting a
photoshoot to record it and uploads the pictures and videos to the Internet.
29 year old German artist Gesine Marwedel creates both beautiful and yet
terrifying pieces of art before sometimes realistic or surreal and again using
techniques that almost completely hide the model. Although she is best known for her
body art works, she studied rehabilitation science from 2005 to 2008
and finished with a Bachelor of Arts graduation. From 2009 to 2016 she was
working as a speech therapist Gesine believes that part can be therapeutic
she has also published a book on how body painting can be used as therapy
though her full-time job is now as an art creative therapist in a center for
autism therapie. Thanks for watching and I hope you enjoyed the video if you did
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