This photograph displays a practise body paint, it was completed in order to practise the techniques taught in class and to improve upon them. An item of clothing was the initial response to create a piece that looked realistic, however choosing a design that most people will know felt more challenging. To begin the lighter colours were applied, starting with the areas of white, slowly building up the layers to ensure that there was a good thickness and the skin could not be seen. This was time consuming as it meant that the layers had to be dried in between in order for the colour to become thick. The next step was to build up the other colours red and blue. Once successfully creating thick layers of these colours the shading and highlighting was necessary. To create the shadow on the abdominals a grey colour was applied and then blended. It was very difficult to blend the grey colour into the red area, which made the colour darker and much harder to blend. The blending on the right side was much more successful as it kept more of the grey colouring and looked more subtle whereas the darkness on the right side of the body was very challenging. On a second attmept to improve this body paint it would be better to allow the paint to throrugly dry and apply the correct colour onto the red section. As the character of Captain America is a man the shading was done to make the chest area look like male pectoral muscles. To create this effect the darker shadows were focused in the centre outlining the chest shape, the blue colour was slowly graduated out to its orignal at the top. The lightest section of blue colour is simply because that area had dried before the rest creating a variation. To make this seamless it would be necessary to let it all dry thoroughly. The final touch was to define the pectoral muscles further creating shadow in the star this was hard as it was necessary to keep the left hand side perfetly white, with a neat yet blended line in the centre. 

Overall the effect worked very well for a first attempt, it proves that body painting is much harder than it gets credit for, it is very challenging to make the clothing look realistic, it takes very slight and subtle tweaks to create an effective result.