If you’re on some sort of social media platform, it’s fairly likely you have seen this fantastic body paint of Piccolo at some point:
The BodypainterThat’s Kay Pike, a Canadian designer and model that’s recently become well known for her stylized body paint takes on well known characters from movies, TV series, and games. While attending Anime Expo 2017, we had a chance to meet with Kay, who was a featured guest at the Bandai booth in the Entertainment Hall. When we met up with Kay, she was in full form and looked something like this:
Needless to say, we had to know how long a job like this would take to pull off. The answer? About 4 hours split between prep, plotting, and painting. We learned that this is fairly typical for a lot of the work that Kay does. However, some pieces end up taking a whole lot more time and effort than others. Her personal record goes to Vegeta, which took over a year if you count the time waiting for all the necessary parts. By the way, the hair is craft foam, wood glue, and acrylic paint.
We wanted to know a bit more about what drove this Canadian craftsman to pick up body painting herself as comic book characters and more. Kay says it all comes from a love for the characters and she sees what she does as enhancement on the source materials (comics, anime, games, manga, etc.) more so than on the characters themselves. She worships the material and its from this place that she found herself drawn to portraying these characters in her own way.
Naturally, we wanted to have a bit of fun so we asked a few random questions:
What was your favorite character to portray?
K: Piccolo is my lucky charm. The first time I did Piccolo, Christopher Sabat showed up to the stream. People didn’t believe it at first but three weeks later @VoiceofVegeta was quoted “Watching KayPike Fashion”.
What’s next on the list for you?
K: Return to Canada, do another live stream, and then off to more cons!
Favorite part of Anime Expo?
K: The production value. Canada has roughly a tenth of the population of the United States. Because of that, you just don’t see events of this scale back home.
Any characters you have planned to do next?
K: Actually, I primarily choose what to do based off of requests from viewers. Feel free to come by and suggest something!
So there you have it! Kay Pike, body painter extraordinaire. (My words, not hers.) It was a pleasure to have the chance to meet and speak with Kay, she’s a nice person! If your curious about Kay or the work she does, go check her out on her Instagram, YouTube channel, Twitch stream, or official site.
This article was first published on BentoByte.
Source: A Quick Chat with Kay Pike at Anime Expo 2017