Good show last night.
First off, Face Off did a special show on body painting, talking about the art form and styles and how it is taking off as an industry and stepping out of the kinky reputation to be more accepted.
They showed some stunning work and talked to body painting industry leaders.
They also interviewed past Face Off contestants who competed on body painting challenges. The first season had the big robe drop surprise. The winner on that season used the wrong paint and the paint actually was peeling and chipping while doing the prep, but she ended up fixing it and winning for transforming her model into a fishlady. The loser did some tribal patterns on a guy with a desert backdrop, pretty much missing the concept.
Season 2 was brought up, with the challenge to hide a model into the backdrop and have a second character interacting with the backdrop. The winners were highlighted, where they painted a lady into the backdrop of a shoe store, and had the guy bouncing a basketball. They used the lady’s ass as the basketball painted up, and painted a basketball uniform on the guy. The real challenge was 15 minutes before they finished the task, the guy model got lightheaded and passed out and had to be rushed off by paramedics, so that contestant had to get a new model and start over with a new 6 hours. Then they superimposed his image over the other image for the final product. it won both for the concept integration and for the great work the guy contestant did blending the girl model into the backdrop, with shoe outlines to cover up.
The loser that round was the pair who had a black and white alley backdrop and tried to put a girl “tagging” the alley walls. They were very inexperienced body painters and struggled getting the colors, even though it was all grayscale.
Nix was a contestant that season, and got eliminated one competition prior to the body painting challenge where he would have excelled. But the very next day was when Red called him up from Naked Vegas to join her shop, and we see how that worked out for him.
While doing this presentation, they had the Naked Vegas team doing body painting on two models. One was woman they were making an artistic rendering of Medusa, the other was hiding a model against the paint shelf backdrop. So the ladies worked on Medusa while Nix and Wiser did the hide the model. It was neat to hear them talk about the actual techniques, of roughing out the lines, putting in the layers of paint to build up the shading, etc. Or how they approach finding the right consistent angle to pull off the masking trick. They went into a bit more detail than a standard Face Off show.
Anyway, that was an entertaining show, mostly connected because the Naked Vegas team did the work.
As for the actual episode, we once again faced two challenges.
The first one, Drew (the business manager guy) had a nephew taking anatomy and struggling with his grade, but got permission for an extra credit project with his lab mates. So they decided to make up the lab mates as the systems of the body for a presentation that the guy would then deliver. So they show up, and it’s three hot young ladies and the guy. Now I know why he thought up that idea for the special project. “My lab mates are hot, I’d like to see them naked. Wait, my uncle works for a body painting company. SCORE!”
So they made up the three girls as the circulatory system, the muscle system, and the skeletal system. They painted the girls up as those diagrams, with half showing he healthy and half showing diseased and damaged.
Nix did skeletal and made an awesome skeleton, decked out so you could see “through” from the front to the back. He did the best skull paint I think I’ve seen. He did the ribcage where you could see through.
Heather and Red did the circulatory system, with the heart and liver and all the blood vessels on a white background.
Wiser did the muscular system with all the muscles and tendons and all drawn in.
The guy, meanwhile, had to work on his presentation as he would be giving the oral talk to discuss the systems. Except he started somehow confusing marrow and red blood cells. :dubious:
So they got all made up and the uncle prepped his nephew, then they went to the presentation, which was held at the Luxor in the Body Works display, where actual cadavers were cut up and turned into artwork displaying the parts of the body. So they came out and modeled off the body systems for their class.
The second challenge was getting called out the the Stratosphere, which was going to host a publicity party for their new show, Pinup, starring 2011 Playboy Playmate of the year, Claire Sinclair. The casino execs wanted to do an out of this world theme and have 9 ladies painted up for the display, made up like planets.
So the team went to work designing planet art with lots of space theme backgrounds - nebulas, stars, comets, galaxies, etc. Basically some general space themed artwork to surround their planet details, which would be displayed on the ladies like a canvas. So they get started on their work, and have a very crowded shop working on 9 ladies at once.
Everything was going well, until the customers called up and told Red they wanted to change directions. The bigwigs didn’t like the planet theme, and instead wanted “googies”. That’s apparently doing up 1950’s style sci-fi concepts like the Jetsons. Talk about last minute redirection. So Red says they’ll give them four models in that style, then they immediately have to dream up concepts and manufacture props out of random stuff they have in the shop. Amazingly they dream up some very cool props out of junk. Nix turns some lamp domes into a spacy glass helmet, and a couple of soda bottles into a cool oxygen tank system. Wiser converts some headphones into a spacy communications system with antennas and such. They dream up some plunging outfits in bright colors.
Also interesting was the technique to add 3-D elements. They apply some adhesive to extend shoulderpads and christmas ornaments to make headpieces and the like. Surprisingly they turned out really spectacular.
Two great sets of work.