Wednesday 29 June 2011

Face Painting

I've been a bit pre-occupied lately and have not been blogging as much as I'd have liked. However, I thought I'd show you a few photos from a recent course I went on to learn some skills in the art of face painting.  Despite having had experience of theatre make-up, I'd never actually done any face painting prior to the course, so was really looking forward to it.

The first part of the course was taken up with theory, tips on how to organise the face paintings on the day of any event, tools needed etc. We then had to answer questions based on the presentation we'd been given, and the rest of the course was dedicated to practical face-painting. We needed to paint 10 different faces and have our photos taken along with the "models" (which were dolls heads - a bit like the "Girl's World" toys girls sometimes use to style hair etc. Our paintings and written work is to be sent off and hopefully we will all have gained a level 2 OCN in face painting!

As expected, I took far too long, although I wasn't quite the last participant to leave, it was very close between myself and one other lady! I sat at a table with two members of a theatre company, which was obviously of interest to me, and another local lady who I got on with so well we are thinking of doing our face painting events together in the future!

Here are some of my efforts - these will improve with time and I should get faster at painting them, especially after practising on real children!  Organised by Karen Routledge, all the paints were Snazaroo - we even got to keep the paints, brushes, sponges etc afterwards!
My very first attempt was this clown.


Rabbit!


Tiger, ROAR!   
A personal favourite, the caterpillar!
The Sea Queen
"Space".

I will be doing my first event on July 8th at a local primary school's summer fair - after that I expect to start holding some taster sessions at the theatre in Bilton to build up a portfolio of work for the future. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and am looking forward to the summer fair!