#war paint

findingfeather:

avelera:

Fun facts I’ve learned from LARPing* a character who wears Celtic woad war paint:

^^ it me! Basically, considers this one part costume/LARP makeup tutorial and one part archaeological study via performance art. (Photo Credit)

(*LARP stands for “Live Action Role Playing” aka, Dungeons and Dragons but you run around in the woods in full costume as your character and yes that means you stay in-character for hours and have to perform all the combat yourself.)

-If you ever see a character with complex war paint on their body, back, or dominant arm that is at all graceful and not just slapped on pigment, then they must have had a friend do it for them. So any surly loner type figure that ALSO has elaborate warpaint is a fucking joke. You literally can’t have warpaint be symmetrical or pretty in places you can’t reach without having an available group of companions and, better yet, artistically inclined friends to put it on for you. War paint would have, by necessity, been a communal activity with group members putting on war paint for one another before going into battle, especially before the invention of easily accessible, high quality mirrors.

Addendum: war paint takes quite a lot of time to apply if you want it to be pretty or symmetrical. I regularly have to clean it all off and start over if I want symmetry and that’s with a mirror and a high-quality paint brush. A warrior that wears elaborate war paint but “doesn’t care about his/her appearance” is a goddamn liar. Unless you are with a group of warriors who are putting your makeup on for you, you do care about your appearance and you are very delicately applying makeup for just as long as a YouTube makeup star, at minimum. It’s a very ego-driven look with a lot of artistic skill required either by you or someone else. Even just making the appearance of a simple straight line on your face can be quite hard since your face has curves and bumps all over it. To do delicate lines takes forever. I chose bold strokes to make it easier and even those take a long time to apply if you’re in a hurry. A warrior who is wearing detailed war paint must have had at least an hour putting their face on to look pretty for the big fight, and don’t let them tell you otherwise.

(Sorry, Kassandra, your warpaint doesn’t make any f-ing sense unless a member of your crew put it on for you.)

-Brightly colored paint on your face will make your eyes look beady and small unless you cake dark eyeliner or pigment around your eyes to make them look bigger. It’s the main difference between good looking war woad pictures (usually on women) and bad looking woad pictures (usually on men) because they don’t remember to put eyeliner on so the colored paint doesn’t drown out their eyes. Even in video games, the best looking and most iconic war paint (like Senua or Kassandra) makes sure to cover the area around the eyes with paint, otherwise the eyes look beady and small. Case in point:

Not to call out real people, but this pic was on the internet. Notice how his blue eyes are drowned out by the pigment, making them look smaller, compared to when there’s pigment around the eyes so that doesn’t happen. By contrast:

^^^ Here, the black pigment around the eyes keeps her eye color from being drowned out by the bold blue. As a final example:

- Fun fact about war paint: that shit transfers everywhere and I mean everywhere without a binding agent of some kind. You’re not wearing war paint with your best silks. Wearing it naked into battle actually makes a lot of sense, as does permanent tattooing instead of temporary paint.

-War paint is actually intimidating as fuck. I’m quite a petite woman (5′4″, 130 lb) but I’m also a fight junky. I knew I was going toe-to-toe with guys twice my size and I wanted to be taken seriously as a warrior, not brushed off as small or cute. And boy howdy, did the warpaint work. And this is why:

- War paint disguises you. It basically works like extreme contouring in that it literally transforms your face. I’ve LARPed across from people for actual years who didn’t know who I was after when I took the paint off. It’s because the brain just registers the paint as my features to them, because most people don’t look at bone structure when recognizing others. It allowed me to build a myth around my character as an intimidating fighter that I could never have built around my normal features. It made my character a truly different person from me, one people only associated with who they see on the battlefield. 

Anyway, thank you for coming to my rambling TED talk, I hope you enjoyed!

So much underline and circle around war paint as a social activity. (Or any elaborate skin painting.) If the culture in question has any sense of ritual it’s almost certainly ritualized as FUCK too. And full of signals of social and ritual status and interconnection.

cultofthewyrm:

Viking Shieldmaiden by Joel Chaim Holtzman

cultofthewyrm:

Mad Hilda by Michelle Tolo