Facepaint UK Blog

Linzi Foxcroft took The UK Face and Body Convention by storm at Telford this year. She not only won the prestigious award of "World Wide Face Painter of the Year" in the experienced class, but she was also chosen by facepaint-uk.com's undercover agents, as the painter who had painted the best make up for the fancy dress Gala Dinner.

The theme was Comics and Super Heroes and everyone had made a fabulous effort with their costumes but we were looking especially at the make-up. Linzi has been awarded a year's free membership of this site plus all the members benefits and goodies and we are very pleased to be able to welcome her here. You can see her work in the Directory and we have also put her in Hot Shots.

The designs that helped Linzi win at Telford this year.

Linzi has been painting for about ten years and trained as a Theatre Designer, specialising in make-up and costume design, but she has only recently discovered the social world of face painters and this was her first visit to any face painting get together. She made the exciting journey from "new girl" to "queen of the ball" in one weekend. Linzi enjoys face painting as a contrast to her specialization which is as an expert in casualty simulation for the military, developing a more serious side to her artistic ability.

Linzi receiving her award at the UK Face Painting Convention. Telford 2006The work of a Casualty Simulation Make-up Artist can be distressing and disturbing because all the injuries Linzi creates are replicating very real trauma. When I asked Linzi about her reactions to the casualty work, she said. "I think about it in terms of shades of red."

Linzi has to research traumatic amputations, bullet wounds, and burns and multiple injuries. She not only works from photographs of the actual wounds but she works with medical units to see it for herself. Her models are ex service men injured in service and people who have lost limbs due to accident or illness; they are able to use their disability to act out a scenario, to enable realistic training for army medics. For some of them it must be a very intense experience reliving the injury again, Linzi says that for them it can be therapeutic, they are happy in the knowledge that their involvement in such exercises can save lives. The purpose of this accurate research is to prepare the medical teams for casualty work in the field.

The Medical teams need realistic patients to practice on before going out into areas of conflict. Doctors and medics have reported that they could not have coped in the field without the planned training exercises because mercifully in this country our medical teams rarely have to deal with the effects of a mass casualty incident due to something like a bomb blast.

Unlike in a film set, Linzi's actors cannot pop back to make-up if they are the patient undergoing a mock operation, because it is taking place in a simulated operating theatre in real time, by real medics. Sometimes the make up has to last as long as 72 hours, casualty's are often moved around, have there injuries handled, dressed with bandages and then removed again, so the make-up or prosthetic must remain intact. Linzi has developed techniques and materials that will do what she needs. Her work has become so much more than a make-up artist and is really helping people.

We didn't know any of this when we admired the make-up Linzi had painted for the Gala Dinner but we really do think she is a super painter now.