Creativity (C) (Face Painting)

I was encouraged to do face painting volunteering for my school's Primary play, as they needed people who were knowledgeable enough on face painting to paint the children. Unfortunately, like many other girls to whom my IB teacher had encouraged to join this activity for CAS hours, I did not have any type of knowledge on face painting, although I did have a good degree of knowledge of painting itself (because I'm an IB student and I really like to practice art during spare time). This is why the first 3 sessions were spent in just practising and learning the basics, but straight after that we had the responsibility of face painting the kids for rehearsals and for the play nights.

I was given the responsibility for making the face painting for all of the male lions for a musical section of the play based on "The Lion King". This meant I had to make the face paint for 2 of the main characters as well as for 2 other lions. I had to got through various stages of practice and experimentation as I went along, practising with different brush sizes and shapes, sponges, water, metallic colours and colour tones to make the composition more lion-like and that stood out from other play characters. I also had a lot of time to speak and hear the children's petitions they had, as many times I was asked by them to paint lion fangs or to make their whiskers larger, as well as getting to listen to their jokes and share with them. I found this really nice, as I don't usually talk with smaller children and this made me think back to my own childhood and the excitement I would have felt too if I were to have my face painted as well. Therefore, I consider that I acquired some self confidence in my own acts and experimentation as well as being able to speak freely with children and with other classmates as we had to work as a team at times to achieve face painting all the children before time ran out.

The only difficulty I encountered was my initial wariness at the beginning of the activity, as I was quite afraid to try out face painting which was completely new to me. This is why, as to decrease my worries on it, I practiced outside of the activity with the help of my mother as to experiment a bit more and increase my speed and confidence. I gradually got over my initial worries and by the end of the activity I felt like I had learnt on teamwork, responsibility, commitment, awareness and a new skill.