Awesome turning Body Paint into a tarantula

First off – it’s not a tarantula. What you’re looking at (and what’s looking at you) started out as an idea two years ago, an idea which examined the threads of human and animal evolution – where we are and what comes next.

It was, says conceptual body artist Emma Fay, something she’d been itching to try and explore in paint. It all fell into place with a move to a larger studio in South Wigston earlier this year and when Emma enlisted fellow colleagues in the Enter Edem creative team, the project was able to proceed.

Emma drafted in contortionists Lowri Thomas and Beth Sykes, and then photographer Jonathan Macauley, and for the next six hours she very, very carefully painted a giraffe onto bendy Beth.

A photograph of Emma’s astonishing quadruped went viral after ending up, quite bizarrely, on the Facebook page of Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal. That was three and a bit weeks ago.