Blue Food Magazine's Blue Ball 2004 with Cheyenne Silver Body Painted by Mark Greenawalt at the Alwun House.

Welcome to the bodypainting webpage for Blue Food Magazine's Blue Ball. These bodypaintings were part of this "night of erotic art, spoken word, performance, and music" held at the Alwun House in Phoenix, Arizona Saturday September 25th, 2004. I have a lot of people to thank for this evening going so smoothly and for bringing my art to life. Here's the scoop.

David Salcido, the driving force behind Blue Food Magazine, had contacted me way back in April to inform me of the upcoming event. He said, "I'd like to personally invite you to join us as a special guest for the evening. Bring some of your lovely models with you and do your thing." So for several months I had been planning what I would paint and who I would paint it on. I came up with an idea that is very difficult to describe with words, but I had a clear vision of what it would look like. For my model, I remembered seeing a relatively new model/photographer team that had some images on-line that I really liked. I liked the fact that the pictures looked a little raw and fresh. It seemed that the photographer and model were shooting "real" pictures and not trying to emulate what books on photography teach as the "right" way to take pictures. I contacted the photographer and talked to him about doing a bodypainting session with his model and having him photograph it. Several months passed by before this project came up and we finally got to work together as a team.

The photographer is Brad Garner and his on-line portfolio is at comixx.deviantart.com. The model is Amy Richey and you can see even more of her images on Brad's web pages. I tried to explain to Brad and Amy what I would be painting, but I don't think that anyone really had a good picture in mind (myself included) until it was done. I had opted to paint Amy before the Blue Ball so that she, Brad, and I would be able to walk around and enjoy the event ourselves. Brad called up a mutual friend of ours, Scott Sanders, to see if we could do the painting at his art gallery, The Paper Heart. He graciously said yes and he is now among the many that I want to say thank you to. We got started around 6:30pm and the painting took a little less than two hours to complete. The process started with wrapping Amy with medical tape. I hadn't used this type of tape before, usually opting for plain masking tape, but I thought this might be a little more flexible and hurt a little less when it is pulled off. Once the criss-crossed latice of tape had been applied, I started airbrushing the blue and black Totally Tattoo body paint. Once all of the spaces were painted, it was time to peel the tape off. It didn't look like it was completely painless, but Amy was a trooper and we had it off in short order. Lastly I added a few shadows to give the impression that the "flesh straps" crossed over each other. For her make-up, I stole the idea from the movie Blade Runner where Daryl Hannah airbrushes black across her eyes. Once complete, we all headed over to the Blue Ball and took in all of the erotica!

The biggest highlight of the Ball for me was seeing Jeanette with Life Suspended doing her suspension (lifted off the ground with flesh hooks in her back and spun around). The Lezbos-A-Go-Go show was cool but way too short. Amy and I were interviewed by both Panic Button Radio and an ASU based station.

Four days before the event I found out that Cheyenne Silver was going to be in town throughout the weekend. Cheyenne's celebrity status originated from her roles in adult films, but more recently she has been branching out and co-stars in a mainstream film called This Girl's Life. She was in town to do appearances in support of her layout in a recent issue of Penthouse and she has and new spread on BallsBiker.com and an upcoming layout in Maxim. She is staying very busy so when I contacted her about coming to the Blue Ball and possibly getting painted, I was thrilled to get a positive reaction from her. Due to her other commitments, she wasn't able to get to the Ball until about midnight, but that turned out to be great since it made her the unofficial headline act. Another thanks goes out to Bryan and Denise Kinnaird who shuttled Cheyenne from venue to venue and helped with the merchandise sales.

For Cheyenne's painting, I couldn't help but do a play on her last name and paint her all silver. For the paint I used a mixture of Mehron Silver Powder and baby oil, which is very messy, but makes some awesome images. There were several hundred in attendance when Cheyenne came on the stage and disrobed. She tied her hair up with her thong, which I found to be very innovative. I had bought a package of three sponge brushes to apply the paint and as I started painting her chest, Cheyenne took one of the other brushes and started painting herself. Then a woman from the audience noticed that there was a third brush and asked if she could help. I asked Cheyenne if she minded and she said no. So there were three of us painting her silver so it only took about 5-10 minutes to complete the painting. I didn't paint her face so that she could still be recognizable in the photoshoot, but I did add a silver stripe under each eye as a war paint tribute to her Native American heritage.

Once the painting was complete we took a few pictures of Cheyenne and Amy in front of the big blue ball backdrop at the Alwun House and then headed out to the professional photoshoot set up at the Paper Heart Gallery. For this shoot I have to thank a co-worker of mine named Jim Maroney who donated his Silver Harley Davidson for the session. Maroney is the drag racer who drives The Great Googly Moogly. If he ever gets all of the silver paint off of his bike that Cheyenne left behind, I may be able to talk him into doing a bodypainting shoot with his funny car. Jim wasn't available to bring his bike down to the Paper Heart at midnight so a friend of his named Rick got the honor of bringing it down and hanging out with the bodypainted ladies. Thanks to Jim and Rick for adding the motorcycle touch to the images!

Brad was able to solicit the help of pro photographer Dayvid Lemmon of www.mechanizedeye.com to provide studio lighting and a high-end digital camera. Both Brad and Dayvid shot Cheyenne and Amy into the wee hours of the morning and came up with some very artistic images. By the end of the shoot, Cheyenne had gotten silver everywhere on the bike, all over Amy, my camera bag ended up with silver all over it, and lastly Cheyenne created some high art by making silver "boob" prints on the Paper Heart's tables. Both of the girls were great to work with and looked awesome. A great time was had by all!

If you are interested in ordering a print from this photoshoot or would like additional information on bodypainting, please feel free to contact mark@futureclassx.com and visit my website at www.futureclassx.com . Please browse through the additional images from the show below. Thanks for visiting!

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