A concept that's been on a slow burn with my friend Parwi. She's been wanting to do a shoot with paint for a long while. The original thought was to wear a white dress and gradually cover it with paint. Then one of Parwi's favourite music artists did a shoot with black paint for the cover of a new album. The singer is Banks and the album Serpentina . And so we set out to do our own shoot using the Serpentina pictures as an inspiration. Google them if you want to see.
A white background was the easy part, the tricky part was finding the right black paint. It turns out that most paints now come with anti drip formulations. Great for the DIY enthusiast but not so good for making creative drips. Adding water to the paint helped but we also resorted to a tin of black molasses for extra stringy drippyness.
The photos are of the shoot from beginning to end. There was some wonderful spring sunshine pouring into my bathroom which was too good to ignore for some makeup photos. After you've got your inspired shots and you are already streaked in black paint you may as well go the whole way and get completely covered.
Getting Ready
First Set
Just a few body poses before getting mucky
Time to get painted
The Final Set.
One thing I love about taking pictures and making art is the moments when something unexpectedly delightful happens. Once Parwi had started covering herself in paint she also dragged her fingers through the paint on her skin making pale lines. They were an inverse of what we started with; black paint lines on skin. Now it was skin lines in black paint. A fabulous serendipitous set of images to finish our shoot.
