In the brief amount of time that I have been dabbling with independent films, I have met some really cool people who are intimately connected to the Phoenix film community.  At the top of this list is Julie Holman who is very active in the Phoenix Film Project (now called IFP for Independent Feature Project).  She was instrumental in getting me featured at the Phoenix Film Festival and the International Horror and Sci-Fi Film Festival.  More recently she has booked me at the Herberger Theater for a recurring happy hour event called Second Act.

On June 13th I was the artist guest of honor at the event along with Laura Durrant.  I was basically given full reigns to do a live bodypainting demonstration and to display some of the lifecasts that I had painted.  Byur Gullwing, the lifecaster that I've been working with, was on hand also to field questions on his part of the process.  The pieces that we displayed were Isis and Pern.

My plan for the bodypainting for the project was to paint a mural on a model of the nude statues that decorate the promenade of the Herberger Theater.  I had just started looking for a model when a business associate of mine mentioned that his wife might be interested in doing it.  I knew that his wife had done some modeling, but until then I wasn't aware that she had done Playboy.  Her name was Sharin Louis and as we discussed the specifics of the project, we realized that we had a common acquaintance.  Sharin was friends with Jill-Ann Spaulding, another model who has graced the pages of Playboy and now has a book to talk about her experiences at the Playboy Mansion.  Jill-Ann is also the driving force behind Top Pair magazine, a poker magazine based in Las Vegas.  As Sharin and I chatted, we decided to do a bodypainting with the top pair theme in the hopes that it might get published in Jill Ann's magazine.

The painting on her back ended up being the two black aces, decorated with some poker chips and pin striping.  I didn't want to completely abandon my original idea of painting a picture of one of the nude statues, so I ended up painting that on her chest.  As far as I know, none of the images made it into the Top Pair magazine, but I was thrilled to find that the Arizona Republic newspaper ran a short article on the event which featured two pictures of me painting Sharin and a large blow-up of the Pern lifecast (see below).