Body Painting Tips

Body painting is one of the most unique kinds of art. People from all over the world paint their bodies to express their thoughts and feelings. People paint their bodies when they are cheering for their team. They also paint their bodies for specific events. Just like a clown paints his face to make people laugh similarly people get their body painted for many reason. The painted body represents creativity and imagination. There are certain tips one can follow while painting their body. A certain procedure is followed for painting the body to ensure that the paint looks beautiful and portrays a sharp image.

Before painting the body it is a good idea to wash and dry your body so that the dust particles are removed. This will help in creating a uniform layer of paint. There are several methods for painting your body. Select the one that best suits you for the following: tempra, markers, liquid latex, airbrush makeup, PAX makeup and textile acrylics. Each technique has its own pros and cons. Using markers are safe and they are cheap but it takes a lot of time to paint the body with markers. Also these markers have to be frequently replaced as they finish up quickly. Using tempra is a bad choice as it flakes off when it dries and makes quite a mess. Although it is cheap but when the paint dries up it becomes powdery.

The use of airbrush makeup to paint the body is a very good choice and highly recommended by professional. Unfortunately it is expensive but the quality is wonderful. Painting with the help of airbrush makeup is flexible and provides excellence in the quality of work. Another good choice for painting body is the use of textile acrylics which are cheap, easy to use, good looking and safe to use. All these are the perfect methods for painting the body. Apart from this while painting the body one must keep certain things in mind. Use a sponge if a larger area is to be painted, it is quicker and easier. Visualizing the end result is a good idea as it will help in the perfect painting of the body. Add special effects by using glitter and other shiny cosmetics. Keep a bundle of tissues while painting so as to quickly remove the mistakes while painting and drawing. All these tips can help in painting the body perfectly.

Body Painting Tips

Body painting is one of the most unique kinds of art. People from all over the world paint their bodies to express their thoughts and feelings. People paint their bodies when they are cheering for their team. They also paint their bodies for specific events. Just like a clown paints his face to make people laugh similarly people get their body painted for many reason. The painted body represents creativity and imagination. There are certain tips one can follow while painting their body. A certain procedure is followed for painting the body to ensure that the paint looks beautiful and portrays a sharp image.

Before painting the body it is a good idea to wash and dry your body so that the dust particles are removed. This will help in creating a uniform layer of paint. There are several methods for painting your body. Select the one that best suits you for the following: tempra, markers, liquid latex, airbrush makeup, PAX makeup and textile acrylics. Each technique has its own pros and cons. Using markers are safe and they are cheap but it takes a lot of time to paint the body with markers. Also these markers have to be frequently replaced as they finish up quickly. Using tempra is a bad choice as it flakes off when it dries and makes quite a mess. Although it is cheap but when the paint dries up it becomes powdery.

The use of airbrush makeup to paint the body is a very good choice and highly recommended by professional. Unfortunately it is expensive but the quality is wonderful. Painting with the help of airbrush makeup is flexible and provides excellence in the quality of work. Another good choice for painting body is the use of textile acrylics which are cheap, easy to use, good looking and safe to use. All these are the perfect methods for painting the body. Apart from this while painting the body one must keep certain things in mind. Use a sponge if a larger area is to be painted, it is quicker and easier. Visualizing the end result is a good idea as it will help in the perfect painting of the body. Add special effects by using glitter and other shiny cosmetics. Keep a bundle of tissues while painting so as to quickly remove the mistakes while painting and drawing. All these tips can help in painting the body perfectly.

Another bloody blog

Small Boo is away looking at dinosaurs, leaving me alone in the house for the weekend. I suppose it’s a sign of my advancing decrepitude that instead of staging a wild and destructive party, my immediate instinct was to go to YouTube in search of that Yellow Pages advert about wild and destructive parties. Oh, and to start a new blog as well. Ha! That caught you out, didn’t it? Or maybe not. Anyway, this one’s about the novel Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. It’s over here, although it hasn’t really started yet. 

Older readers may recall that I tried something similar a few years ago, but I’m hoping that this will be a bit more satisfying. Chasms of the Earth was an attempt to work out why such a badly written book was so successful. Actually reading the bloody thing was easy enough, like gorging on cheap chocolate, but finding something worthwhile to say about it was a tougher call and I gave up at about the halfway point. (To be fair, I had by then answered my initial question; lots of short sentences.) Infinite Jest, on the other hand is rather longer and – according to those who have attempted it – better and more difficult. Even if Bret Easton Ellis begs to differ.

Anyway, we shall see how this one goes. Normal Cultural Snow business will be maintained as per usual, although I suspect there may be one or two blog posts about blog posts appearing. And now I’d better go and start reading the bloody thing...

Playboy Goes Tech - How Playboy Gets Their Geek-On With a Tron Pictorial

Who would have thought that Playboy would try to get their geek-on by creating their Tron pictorial? Inspired by the movie, Tron: Legacy, Playboy's Tron pictorial, "Game on" video, and behind the scenes footage of the photo shoot, are an amazing sight and truly phenomenal art work.

It all starts with a rather artistic venture by Hugh Hefner's Playboy team. The renowned magazine and business empire took two of its playmates and turned them into phenomenal Tron-style, high-tech looking masterpieces that impressed me more as a work of art than anything else. The shoot and video definitely don't disappoint fans of Playboy, as well as other fans of art in general.

It's interesting to see how the playmate Irina Voronina and Sasckya Porto, are transformed with the careful application of bodypaint to get them "Tronned up" for the shoot. Also in the photo shoot and video: Playboy's "Game On" features custom-built Tron cycles. Printwork and video aside, one of the most interesting parts of the work are the featured Parker Brothers Choppers Light Cycles, which are replicas of the Tron cycles.

Though the Tron cycles are totally awesome to look at, Tron cycles are said to come with a tall price tag of $35,000 each. The custom Tron bikes were created by Parker Brothers Choppers of Melbourne, Florida, who are creating a total of five custom-built bikes based on the light cycles from Tron: Legacy. Scoring one of these neon-glow, street legal motorcycles for yourself for that minimum of $35,000 may be unlikely for the average person, but there are a lot of chopper fans who would like to collect one.

Playboy Tron's "Game On" video is technically nude in some parts, but is fairly tame compared to most of their industries comparative material After all, the Playmates are all strategically covered in bodypaint. Playboy truly gets all geeked-out creating this real-life Tron style battle between the Playmates. The even implemented the light discs in the fight. For those of you who are not fans of the Playboy empire, viewing the Playboy Tron features will still likely leave you appreciating it as a creative and genuinely artistic work.

Playboy Goes Tech - How Playboy Gets Their Geek-On With a Tron Pictorial

Who would have thought that Playboy would try to get their geek-on by creating their Tron pictorial? Inspired by the movie, Tron: Legacy, Playboy's Tron pictorial, "Game on" video, and behind the scenes footage of the photo shoot, are an amazing sight and truly phenomenal art work.

It all starts with a rather artistic venture by Hugh Hefner's Playboy team. The renowned magazine and business empire took two of its playmates and turned them into phenomenal Tron-style, high-tech looking masterpieces that impressed me more as a work of art than anything else. The shoot and video definitely don't disappoint fans of Playboy, as well as other fans of art in general.

It's interesting to see how the playmate Irina Voronina and Sasckya Porto, are transformed with the careful application of bodypaint to get them "Tronned up" for the shoot. Also in the photo shoot and video: Playboy's "Game On" features custom-built Tron cycles. Printwork and video aside, one of the most interesting parts of the work are the featured Parker Brothers Choppers Light Cycles, which are replicas of the Tron cycles.

Though the Tron cycles are totally awesome to look at, Tron cycles are said to come with a tall price tag of $35,000 each. The custom Tron bikes were created by Parker Brothers Choppers of Melbourne, Florida, who are creating a total of five custom-built bikes based on the light cycles from Tron: Legacy. Scoring one of these neon-glow, street legal motorcycles for yourself for that minimum of $35,000 may be unlikely for the average person, but there are a lot of chopper fans who would like to collect one.

Playboy Tron's "Game On" video is technically nude in some parts, but is fairly tame compared to most of their industries comparative material After all, the Playmates are all strategically covered in bodypaint. Playboy truly gets all geeked-out creating this real-life Tron style battle between the Playmates. The even implemented the light discs in the fight. For those of you who are not fans of the Playboy empire, viewing the Playboy Tron features will still likely leave you appreciating it as a creative and genuinely artistic work.

Stephen Leather and the sock puppet blues

There’s been something of a commotion in that murky space where writing and commerce meet on the web. The thriller writer Stephen Leather has admitted to creating various online identities with which to praise his own titles and disparage those of his writers and RJ Ellory has been caught out doing the same; meanwhile, John Locke bought 300 reviews to raise the profile of his self-published titles. This is nothing new of course; the novelist John Rechy was caught out as far back as 2004. Before these misdeeds are dismissed as a problem solely for the cut-throat market in genre fiction, let’s not forget that the (previously?) respected historian Orlando Figes was busted on much the same charges a couple of years ago; and as Christopher Howse points out, Walter Scott and Walt Whitman also transgressed, albeit not on Amazon. Much of the more recent nefarious activity has been exposed thanks to the sterling efforts of the author Jeremy Duns, and he’s among the signatories to a letter in the Telegraph deploring such activities and vowing never to transgress in a similar manner.

Now let’s put this in context, which is not to acquit Leather and Ellory and co of any apparent wrongdoing. There are too many books and far too many authors and not nearly enough readers. This has always been the case. In the last few years, technology has made it even easier for wannabe authors to get product into the public domain, but they usually have to do so without the professional advice and support of conventional publishers. At the same time, those who do have professionals behind them find that the level of back-up is being reduced; a publishers will attend to editing, printing and distribution but the burden of raising a work’s profile increasingly falls on the author. And someone who knows how to write a readable thriller or cook book or erotic blockbuster may also have the savvy for self-marketing and social media, but it doesn’t necessarily follow.

And this is where things start to get a bit grey. Ian Hocking has mused with his customary sagacity about the dilemmas encountered by self-published writers. I’ve always had a bit of corporate heft behind my own modest efforts, but I’ve still had to do quite a bit of donkey work. I haven’t taken to bestowing five stars upon my own books, but I have made efforts to raise my own profile on Amazon and elsewhere. If I send free copies to friends, on the understanding that they’ll write an online review at some point, is that a bad thing? When posting such reviews, should they make clear that they know me? (Some do; some don’t.) Am I entitled to get annoyed with the ones who don’t keep up their end of the bargain. Or do I just assume that they’ve posted negative reviews under a pseudonym and haven’t told me? What about the Amazon Vine system, or LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers, by which free copies are sent out to people who request them? Is that more or less needy than sending a review copy to The Guardian or the New York Times? What about the mutual back-scratching that Private Eye always identifies with its round-up of the books of the year. Is that better or worse than what RJ Ellory has done. Are there rules? Conventions? Should there be a law?

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the writers who signed the Telegraph letter, but I’d hazard a guess that Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Joanne Harris don’t feel compelled to check into Amazon every 20 minutes to check incremental shifts in their sales ranks, or whether “A reader from Norwich” has given their latest opus three or four stars. And again, I don’t condone what the likes of Stephen Leather have done. But I’ll admit to a twinge of sympathy for someone who pushes the ethical envelope a little too far in an effort to rescue his or her life’s work from oblivion.

Of course, the problem isn’t confined to authors and similar fey ponces. Review sites for restaurants and hotels become all but useless when they’re taken over by PR hacks. And despite all the  complaints about Wikipedia being a platform for know-nothings, I get far more annoyed when a page has clearly been tidied up by someone rather too close to the subject. I’ve said before that Andrew Keen got things wrong in his silly book, but as social media becomes ever more important, I start to see that the reality is the exact reverse of what he describes. Pretty soon, it’ll be just another Cult of the Professional. And they’re the ones who really should know better.

PS: Alison Flood in The Guardian covers much the same ground, but some of the comments are interesting. Not sure if the pro-Leather one is sock-puppetry or sarcastic or sincere or what.

PPS: More on the historical perspective.

The half-arsed metafiction of Ian McEwan

When I was young and thin and floppy-haired and given to spouting Situationist one-liners while wearing my late grandfather’s trilby and drinking tequila, the book we were all talking about was If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, by Italo Calvino. This was a piece of metafiction, a novel that acknowledged and drew attention to and played about with its own fictional status. You could tell this from the off because the first line was “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveller.” 

Of course, metafiction wasn’t new, even that long ago; think Tristram Shandy, Don Quixote, back to The Odyssey and probably even earlier than that. But once you’ve had your eyes opened to it, you see it in the unlikeliest places. The example I always use to explain it is this reaction shot from the movie Trading Places, where Eddie Murphy doesn’t so much demolish the fourth wall as tap it lightly for a moment, just to remind you it’s there. In fiction, it seems to drift in and out of fashionable acceptability. Douglas Coupland, David Mitchell and Jennifer Egan have had fun with it in recent years, but champions of earnest, caring seriousness such as Jonathan Franzen disapprove of such japes. And there appears to be a worrying new trend opening up somewhere between the two schools of thought, where it’s acceptable to write 95% of a serious, straightforward, linear novel with a beginning and a middle and no characters who share the author’s name and then in the last few pages to say, look, sorry, all that stuff you were just reading? All that emotional investment you made? I didn’t really mean it. It was Just A Story. Now, where’s the invitation to Hay? It’s as if metafiction has been degraded, from an attempt to challenge complacent literary conventions, to a lame punchline, the and-then-I-woke-up ending that’s taken an MA in creative writing. The revolution went backwards; Elvis joined the army and all we were left with was Pat Boone and Cliff Richard. Yann Martel did it in Life of Pi, as did Jonathan Coe in his most recent, deeply disappointing effort, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim.

But the big one was Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which a good chunk of the plot is revealed at the end to be a self-redeeming fiction created by a novelist suffering from dementia. Whereas Calvino or Sterne would be happy to introduce the befuddled writer at an early stage, drifting in and out of the narrative, challenging and cajoling the reader who might be expecting a nice little country house potboiler, McEwan doesn’t trust us. We have to be fully absorbed into the world of the characters or we may just jump ship. In fact, it would be quite feasible to read the book without the dénouement.

Atonement did very nicely, thank you, and they got a big movie out of it, but you would have thought McEwan might have got the whole metafiction thing out of his system, or alternatively had the guts to write a metafictional narrative that was upfront from the first line. Instead, he’s written Sweet Tooth. On the face of things, it’s a spy thriller. The most obvious debt is to John le Carré, but most specifically to the recent movie version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, because McEwan really piles on the early-1970s period detail; le Carré didn’t bother, because he was writing in the 70s, so he didn’t need to discuss Ted Heath and the IRA and the three-day week and Jethro Tull. It wasn’t period detail, it was now. (In the acknowledgements, McEwan thanks several of those pop history books about the 1970s that everyone was reading at the end of the Noughties, when they should really have been reading about the Noughties. Just thought I’d mention that.)

Although Sweet Tooth shares the glum griminess of le Carré’s Circus, McEwan’s protagonist Serena Frome is far down the pecking order from George Smiley et al. Rather than overseeing deep-cover agents in Moscow or Belfast, her role is to headhunt and subsidise writers whose work might provide intellectual heft to the western, anti-communist cause, without them realising they’re effectively MI5 stooges. Serena loves books, especially novels, although parental pressure contributes to her reading mathematics at Cambridge (and getting a third) rather than the Eng Lit degree she should have taken. This gives McEwan the chance to place in her mouth disobliging remarks about postmodern jiggery-pokery and how she favours more conventional narratives. “I said I didn’t like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page,” she declares. And:

I suppose I would not have been satisfied until I held in my hands a novel about a girl in a Camden bedsit who occupied a lowly position in MI5 and was without a man.

which is followed by a dig at Borges and Barth. We also get walk-on parts from literary big hitters of the time, including Martin Amis, Angus Wilson, the publisher Tom Maschler and the editor Ian Hamilton. But McEwan doesn’t write himself into the plot (as Amis did in Money), presumably because that would tip off the reader that something funny was going on. Tom Haley, the author that Serena inveigles into her scheme (and with whom she embarks on an evidently doomed relationship) clearly has some similarities with the novelist, not least his background at Sussex University and the content and style of his short stories; although the novel that makes his name seems to be a reworking of The Road, albeit one written 30 years before Cormac McCarthy had the idea, which takes us into Death of the Author territory. The combination of all these nose-tapping hints suggests to the alert reader that there’s something clever-clever coming along at the end, which makes it feel even more like a gimmick. I won’t spoil things if you’re going to read the book, but just remember that one of the central characters is a novelist. OK?

McEwan can still write of course. The first line of his first book is still one of my favourite opening gambits: “In Melton Mowbray in 1875 at an auction of articles of ‘curiosity and worth’, my great-grandfather, in the company of M his friend, bid for the penis of Captain Nicholls who died in Horsemonger jail in 1873.” And that skill hasn’t deserted him in Sweet Tooth: “Arguing with a dead man in a lavatory is a claustrophobic experience.” But it would be nice if he remembered how to tell a story; and to have the guts, where necessary, to tell us that he’s telling a story from the beginning, rather than leave it as a lame, postmodern punchline.