Creating a Futuristic Robot

By Claire Pick

Ideas for body paints often start off to be quite small and simple and then develop and grow as you work with them.

I was busy working on a design for a futuristic robot for Julie and I to paint on the Illusion stand at the UK Face and Body Painting Convention in October 2010. I researched some ideas on the internet, looking at cartoon characters and also robots in films. I began by drawing out some ideas on paper on a body template and then set about having a practice run on my model. I only had a couple of hours to paint, so concentrated on the torso, painting in the muscles in green using three big body brushes loaded with different shades of green.

Then I outlined the green shapes with black and dusted on some metallic powders to give an interesting effect. Julie really like the images that I sent over to her and suggested we work with some prosthetics to give a really 3D effect. We met Rus of Awen Creations at the Welsh Body Painting Festival and were immediately impressed with the prosthetics he creates. The futuristic robot idea was really moving along with Julie’s input and ideas for cogs, nuts, bolts and chains to glue to the model. Armed with a box full of Rus’s prosthetics, we headed off to the UK convention with our model Laurence and a rough idea of what we wanted to create.

The whole design took most of the day to paint, and we had help from Sean Avram, Suzanne Mykolajenko and Katrina Bate, who all helped at some point through the day! As you can see, the design changed and moved on from the original plan, but that is the beauty of paint, you can go with it, change things, try different ideas and achieve stunning results.