Sunday, April 27, 2008

Princess's and Angels and Rugby Tigers


So I had a pretty dead work load (ie none!) over most of Feb as I don’t think face painting is a big thing in Chinese parties yet. And it was too cold to do the markets I used to go to - as we have no form of heating on the boat (most Of HK doesn;t!)
the cat spent her time buried in whatever covers we were in or boxes I was filling (still not emptied the boat or finished re-decorating it!)
and refused to get up when we did. But shes a great foot warmer. Plus we were both ill a lot so I spent a lot of time covering myself in the black tarry goop used to refill the old rubber deck caulking I gouged out, to try to stop the leak in our bedroom ceiling.
I’d get covered in it, growling at the cat o stay away, I’d go to eat or the loo and come back to find wee black paw prints everywhere and her growling as she tried to lick her feet clean…..




A lady who’s kids party I’d painted at booked me for a school fair. One of the best ones I have been to actually – they only do it every 2 years and have an actual budget for it. Parents run each room and there is an overall theme to do with whatever the school have been learning.
This time it was a Knight’s Fayre so most of the classrooms, activities and stalls had a medieval theme and I had to buy a princess dress (could only fit sleeping beauty!) to wear. I was only allowed to do faces in keeping too, so stuck to superfast princess and dragon faces mainly.
A huge effort had been made and the place was transformed! Parents had to have bought their kids pretend money with ‘real’ money, so even the wee kids had to use maths etc to barter or pay for everything, and my money basket had to be empted several times - I definitely earned my wages for them.
I had a queue the whole time and was getting distracted by the crafts in my area which include decorating crowns, candles and yummy biscuits. Best of all I got a nice cheque at the end (well it took them 3 months to get it to me but still!) and lots of praise about quality & speed – think before they had someones mum trying to paint and I ran her ‘record’ into the ground.


I think I mentioned the posher boat club in Aberdeen, the Marina Club. A lady who's kids party I did and who runs a party supply shop booked me as one of her ‘entertainments’ there as she also does cakes/ organising parties. Bit mad – HUGE ballroom and her husband was saying how he hates decorating them as the chandeliers tangle with the helium balloons.
As well as me there were 4 pro photographers, a guy printing your face onto specially designed for the party mugs, keyrings and badges, sticky sand art pictures, window art things, and wax hand casting.
Oh and a singing stage show pretending to be some popular TV kids band. Mental. Most were Chinese toddlers and I HATE it, they all want a tiny stupid heart on their cheek or a Mickey Mouse on their hand as that’s all they have ever had offered before, usually in crap paints that don’t wash off. (I refuse –say its copyright as I have heard of some painters being sued by Disney or Garfield!).
Typically after a painful couple of hours some older kids braved full faces and I got inundated and was asked to stay longer!


What is nice is afterwards I can walk next door to the Aberdeen Boat Club (less posh) and get their ferry boat round the coast to Middle Island for free!

Petes story& my pics of the Interschool’s regatta got front page & several more inside the sailing mag which was cool.


I started spending a few days in the YAF studio to paint new rugby ideas on myself to photo for the team at this years Rugby 7’s, and really got on with the girl replacing my mate Sarah (the lady who ‘spotted’ me on my 1st HK gig and got me to do the Rugby bid with her last year then all the other Youth Arts projects). Pat grew up joining in dance projects with YAF so it’s a nice circle to complete – and she also said she’d love to be my model!

Since I have been asked to demo at 2 International face & body conferences this summer, I am really keen to get more bodypainting done – the last arty 1 (and about the only interesting 1) I did was for the fashion mall in December with Ambah – she just sent her pics which was good.


HELLO! So I grabbed her, arranged to meet up on a Saturday morning and did a quick (under 4 hour) painting of a sort of angel for an online body competition on the theme of Dreams that ended that evening.
I had planned something totally different, but passing the street of fancy dress stalls the night before, saw these cute angel wings and got inspired. So she had a sort of night sky background with a moon on her tummy button, and clouds on her knickers with feathery boobs. I had planned to do a night scene below here knickers as if she was looking over people as they slept but ran out of time.

She was BRILLIANT and as a dancer has a lovely healthy body – plus she’s so pretty and good at posing! I’d bought a black sheet for a backdrop, and we arranged for the head of YAF’s son (Linz’s hubby is a pro photographer and Sam wants to follow him) to come and snap shots. Plus Linz was the 'stylist', doing her hair and shouting poses - fab!
GREAT result, I was really pleased with it all. Funny thing is Pats new job title is ‘Art Angel’s Co-ordinator’ so Linz used one of the shots as her publicity announcement!
Poor Pat went to show off her body (wearing old clothes over to it) to some mates so didn’t have time for a proper shower before her hockey match, and dyed her kit blue as she played!
I ended up winning the comp which was fab, got a bunch of free paints to be collected at the UK conference, and was on the front page of their www for a few months. Funny thing was next week the publishers of Illusion magazine asked if I’d do a face for the next step-by-step book they were producing, a version of my DreamCatcher one at Seeboden, so I turned Pat blue for that again!

I finally got to see Tai Tam, doing a 1st birthday party for a Canadian couple, and wow, the houses were stunning!

Palm trees, Tai Tam, Hong Kong
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.

About 5 floors each, overlooking the seas towards the south of Stanley. He must have loved his pizzas, as as well as an amazing BBQ he had a professional Pizza oven on his patio!
It was jungle themed so kids took home amazing plush toys, and as a rainstorm started I was given a lift back to the beach path home by their chauffeur!


Well, the next time I worked with Pat was the Rugby 7’s. Pete drove the boat round to the Causeway Bay club and we parked between several other live aboards – the cat was freaked out by all the generator etc noises. So, it was relatively easy to get onto land and take a taxi from the club to the HK stadium. Getting past the security at the staff entrance was harder as bottles of liquid etc were banned but as I had most of my body painting liquid paints with me……

They had moved us so the main stall was parallel to rather than in front of the main entrance, so we were sadly not in front of the pitch any more and were a bit harder to find/ see. But had a space between the 2 main stalls where we put seats so the next 15 customers could have a sit down whilst queuing which was appreciated. This year was much better as Pat stayed to co-ordinate and trouble shoot the whole time, and the volunteer teams who were taking the money for us (they get free tickets for about 5 hrs work) had a staff member from the rugby organising them and were all given uniform shirts. So by the 2nd day it was much better organised – last year I was supposed to be sorting all 3 stalls AND the vols AND keep the queue down as I paint at least 3x faster than the YAf girls…..
This year I had tried to put in more creative stuff rather than 'just' flags too, to keep us interested, like a dragon princess for Welsh girls, etc.
The week up to it there are womens matches (the finals in the stadium on Sat a.m) and then kids matches every morning of the 3 day main event. I think that is BRILLIANT, all the wee tots getting to play in front of crowds (most turn up as soon as gates open to make sure they get seats in the popular adult alcoholic south stand), must be really inspiring! 1 kid who’s team play in tiger striped strip came to me for another tiger face – turns out I painted him last year and also before that at the ticket sales launch, and the stadium asked permission to film him.
Appears him in my tiger face and his rugby strip was on TV several times a day for 6 months advertising the Rugby 7s and I never knew! And I was told last year another mum let a pro photographer take a pic of my face on her daughter that was then sold to papers all over Scotland - !!!!!!!

Anyway the 1st day was hot, steamy and a bit rainy and we were fairly quiet, just as well as most of the girls hadn’t turned up for the training day, so I got to show them how to use the rainbow paint I made.
And also the idea to speed up all the boring small flags – got them all rugby ball stencils so we sponged most flags through them. They were cheapest, then half face designs (including talking dinos, pretty eyes and team logos) then full faces.Stuff like the england flag and NZ/ Australia were OK, the USA is fiddly and we ALL hated the really annoying flage like Fiji and the African countries - so much detail and tend to look naff!
Next year I want to make stencils the right shape & size for the petals of the bauhinia flower on Hk's flag too......
As I could do half bodies faster than most girls did a face, I was on body painting too. Pat was a very willing advertising board and kept being grabbed by film crews too!



I stopped painting at the rugby by 7pm on Friday as I’d been there extra early to set stuff up, and had another job booked that evening.
They had wanted me on Sat a.m. but I would be at the rugby from 7am so that was out. I’d had a nightmare week trying to order paintable tattoo ink (lasts a week) from the USA for an agent who booked me to decorate 4 women as Amy Winehouse. (everyone goes to the Rugby 7s in fancy dress and this was their ideas – they ad the Betty boop style dresses and her huge beehive wigs). I didn’t realise until I researched how much of herself the singer has now covered with rather crude pin-up style tattoos! After a lot of hassle the USA company shipped it to me (at great cost as tiny alcohol based bottles are allegedly dangerous), but when it didn’t arrive I found out that despite special instructions on the orders, many emails and THEIR confirmation all saying to post it to HK, they posted it to the UK where my billing address is! Was NOT impressed and went off to buy permanent OHP pens which Bibi said were the best alternative, and spent a day making as many of the shapes in stencils as I could….it worked OK on 3 of them but the last girl (who said she’d had trouble with stuff on her skin before) it just would not mark, weird! Plus despite the agent greeting we’d only do some of the tattoos they expected them ALL which would have taken hours per body! We settled on 2 on each arm and a chest one…..hope they lasted overnight, I didn’t hear back……

Amy Winehouse 'tatt'
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.



Sat a.m. I was there nice and early and the sweet rugby staff guy was there helping me set up too. As I had over an hour before the YAF girls turned up, I was able to lay down the (very hungover) 1st body paintee who had booked in on their tables – he got my number from his friends who were the team I painted in HK shirts last year. I did have 2 6ft7 guys booked in to be painted as a tiger and a zebra but they cancelled at the last minute as they wanted to sleep!
Anyway I did him a welsh flag as a shirt, and his mate wanted the Australian flag as a shirt on his front and I came up with a ‘kangeroo warning’ roadsign on his back which looked fab.
His girl then had a flag belly butterfly (very popular this year) and later on I ended up doing several more body flag shirts on people who had spotted them.

It’s such a lovely atmosphere, everyone chats away at total strangers. I did get annoyed at the boos for the French team, that wasn’t nice or fair!
I did an HK shirt on Pat and even tho she had sweated it off mostly by lunch, people still thought she was dressed when she was just in a bikini! As usual the walk home was mad, all the drunk & happy strange outfits getting more noticeable as we started mixing with the non-rugby crowd towards Causeway Bay.

Tired clown, HK Rugby 7s 2008.
Originally uploaded by wildcatfin.



Sunday was the best weather (ie sweltering) and as I’d been put in the front of the stalls to showcase what we did and also as I needed the space for bodies, I was already a bit pink wherever I hadn’t face painted myself. I spent the days chasing small patches of shade! And FINALLY we were as busy as last year – huge queues non-stop. Pat ended up closing the ticket sales for an hour to let us catch up at one point, and turning away people by closing the line every 40 minutes or so. The rugby vol staff guy shut us down completely at 5 which was a shock – last year we kept going till 10 most nights. But, fair enough, he said we and his vols deserved a chance to see the games and experience the whole thing. He even bought us all pitchers of beer! My last face of the day was a USA kid who wanted an american football helmet - and could I think what that looked like??? His dad tried to talk me through it and the kid was very happy with what I did!
As we had a large crowd still, and Pat had wanted to be painted to go out partying, we kept the crowd barriers up and I painted her as a pink tiger. I think it only took an hour or so but we had a fascinated audience the whole time, and should have kept the donation boxes out for all the people wanting photos with her.
We finished to watch the last few matches – great stuff – and the closing ceremony, opera singers and all!

Pat was invited off to a private box by some scary person (think he had mob connections so she didn’t say no) and sadly got chucked into the crowd who poured beer on her, so returned as a very drippy tiger! She was quite miffed as had planned to go clubbing with her mates still painted - and then did anyway!
Pete met me in the crowds streaming out at the end and mentioned he'd seen a drippy pink tiger so at least it was still recogniseable....Best was the All Blacks won, and spent an hour after the closing fireworks, stripped to their waists, performing haka dances every few metres around the edge of the pitch so we all got a good view of one. Mmm, nice!!!!!


By the time I had showered and got back to the boat, Pete had had enough of the noise, smell and raw sewage of the Causeway Bay marina and decided we should drive back to Middle Island, west along the split between HK & Kowloon, then south along the west coast of HK. Fine, until we quickly realised thick fog was coming in so it was a bit hairy in the end. Worst was the huge container ships who for some reason had a light on the front then nothing for miles of deck then a light on the back housing bit - and couldn't see us! Hated it when we got to the 'unoccupied' bits between the westren district and Pokfulam, as it was pitch black so we also had to watch out for the shore! Amazing phosphoresence though once we got passed Aberdeen.
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