Face Painting and Zombies

Posted on Aug 27, 2009 10:43:00 PM

Last weekend I attended Chimera, the New Zealand roleplay convention.  It was a blast, if you’re free in late August 2010, you should show. Really!  Watch the movie Role Models all the way to the end and tell me that doesn’t look like fun.  Chimera is way better than that.  There were so many hilarious or just plain excellent games. A 60′s James Bond spoof, a Victorian mashup with real and fictional characters, Arthurian fantasy, horror… you name it, it was probably there.  The 20/20 team were there too, though I managed to avoid that for the most part!  I did have to get involved on the Saturday night when the reporter was convinced to join in the Victorian era game.  They asked me to cover up the elastic straps of his fake beard with face paint and they brought the camera with them! Ack!  Fortunately they were really nice people and just filmed Hugh and my hands doing the painting. They took so many hours of film, it’s unlikely they’ll even use it, anyway.  It did occur to me after that it was a great opportunity to publicise what I do lost, though. I really have to get over my camera phobia.  It’s not like the face painting or the larping are big secrets in my life!

Being the resident face painter, I get a number of requests whenever I Larp, which is cool.  This time there was a green feather for an elf girl. Easy! She asked me for something I could do! Yay!  There was also a scar for another lady and a black eye for a guy, but I failed to get a photo of those due to being in a massive rush.  If I find someone else has a shot of them I’ll put them up (edit: found a mobile phone upload of the black eye, see? ).  Oh and also an orc fellow with a monobrow. That was fun, but my photo sucks. I think I’ve got something on the lens of my camera.

On Saturday morning I got to redeem myself with regard to my undead greeblies.  My previous zombie  face painting  experience was less than stellar.  This time it was much better.  I had my own gear and it was daytime even! I think they looked good, but I’m really looking forward to going to a Wolfe Brothers workshop in October where I can improve my monsters to a place where i’m really happy.  I didn’t think I’d like face painting icky stuff, when I started I was really only into the pretty butterflies and princesses and tigers. I still love painting all those things, but I’m starting to enjoy doing other, less beautiful things too.

So, here are a couple of photographs taken by the uber-ninja photographer Judit Klein.  You never see her, and then you see photos and you go, “Really? You were there?”. Good fun.  This isn’t all the greeblies, but they’re my favourite shots.