Saturday, December 19, 2009

Mayan Jaguar Warrior



The theme for the Body Painting Competition at Bodyssey in Toronto this year (April 2009) was "Mystery". I decided to translate that as the Mystery of the Ancient Maya, and came up with this Jaguar Warrior painting. We were given 4 and a 1/2 hours to paint, actually, the doors opened to the room at 4 1/2 hours before the end time, so our set up was included in that time period! That is NOT a lot of time to paint an entire body! But this short period did one thing for me.... I have never been more organized for a painting! I set up split cakes to deal with some of my shading and striated areas, and tried very very hard to stick to my time break downs.

My model was Jennifer Malo, a good friend of mine, who is also a painter, and she was very helpful in reminding me to paint faster! My paint area was positioned right next to Lucie Broulliard, who has won many many awards at the World Body Painting Competition, so it was pretty intimidating... I kept thinking, I have to paint faster, and I have to paint better!

There were a few things that I didn't get done on this painting: I wanted to do a little more to the gold accessories, make it more molten and more 3-D, I didn't get the shadows done that I wanted, and there was a detail that I had to leave out. But, I was super happy with the jade breast plates, the turquoise/jade necklace and belt, and the jaguar pelt!

The best part of this painting is that it garnered me 10th place in a competition full of Big Guns in the body paint world!

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