Emma Fay is a special kind of artist. Her canvas is the human body. Gemma Peplow takes a close look at her remarkable work
You might be a bit confused by the image you see before you. Because the picture above is not, in fact, an octopus, but four very bendy ladies, who have performed some serious Twister movements and been painted oh-so-carefully by brilliant body artist Emma Fay.
And the next pic: that's a painting of bendy ladies as well, and not a bee, as you might have thought.
Pretty incredible, eh?
"The octopus is one contortionist and three models," says Emma. "It's hard when you have several contortionists making something. The bee was difficult as well. You have to get people to line up, and they can move and sway. It can be tricky.
"Everyone has to be patient and, luckily, they all are. I do feel for the contortionists. But they know they're going to get a good image out of it so they're fine. It's an interesting process."
Emma, 27, has always been "arty''. Her mum was good at art, she says, and encouraged her children to be creative when they were young.
"She would sit us in front of piles of recycling and encourage us to make things, just stupid stuff, lots of animals and things like that. We used to paint a lot and made things with papier mache. That's how we'd spend our time when we were young."
Emma, who still lives in Leicester, went to school at St John's Primary School, in Clarendon Park, and then St Paul's Catholic School, in Evington, where she did A-levels in art and design.
She then got a place at Nottingham Trent University to study theatre design, but soon realised that "uni wasn't the place for me".
Emma liked to manage herself, so she left. Art became a hobby for a while, rather than something she was looking to pursue a career in.
"I ended up doing a massage course, which was brilliant because I thought I could travel anywhere with that, and that appealed. I would look at theatre make-up courses but nothing quite covered what I wanted to do with it. "So, I ended up running a salon in Saffron Lane for six years, doing hairdressing and make-up."
Over the years, Emma brought face painting and body art into the salon. By the time she was 24, she realised she wanted to do more.
"It wasn't enough to keep me happy," she says, "so it made sense to go."
After starting off painting "some very bad flowery things," Emma began to think about using bodies as canvases.
The nature of her work took her to all sorts of unusual places, including The Zoo Project, in Ibiza, where she saw contortionist Beth Sykes in action.
"I'd been looking at her and she was bending away, and I just thought, 'Hmmm, I'd love to make her into something. Into a giraffe.
"I used to paint her for different events and I'd paint her like an Avatar. We became friends from that and she was willing to play, to help with this idea."
Emma finally got the chance to put her idea into practice earlier this year, after setting up a studio in South Wigston. Before that, she was freelancing, "working in different places, as and when".
The giraffe was the first thing she painted there.
"It went really well," she says. "It must have taken about five hours to do, I think."
It looks like a pretty hard thing to do, doesn't it, painting animals on to contortionists?
And it's even harder than it looks, says Emma. Because with contortionists, you have to paint according to how their bodies will stretch and bend, and not just as you see it.
"You have to visualise which parts go where, mark things out, get them to come in and out of a pose. Check them in the pose, get them out, paint a bit more.
"The bends in the body are by far the most interesting thing about it. You have to play with perspectives, as you're not painting them in the pose. It's painting shapes that don't necessarily look correct from any other angle or position."
Fortunately, Emma loves the challenge.
"I love to push what I can do to the absolute limits. Some take longer than others; it all depends on the angles. I enjoy thinking of different ways to solve problems.
"It's seeing through the eyes of the camera and what it's supposed to look like from a distance.
"There's a speed to it, because paint starts cracking, things fade, so you have to work quite quickly."
The giraffe, and all the animals, were about the idea of evolution, "because humans have reached their evolutionary peak with contortion".
Although there are lots of brilliant body artists out there, says Emma, there's no-one using contortionists, that she's aware of.
She and Beth were pleased with their giraffe. They knew it was interesting, that it looked good. But they weren't expecting the reaction it got.
"I put a picture online and it just went viral, it had 100,000 likes in a day. It went all over the place."
So Emma painted another animal, a tarantula, which has proved even more popular. It led to interest from the national press, with a centre spread in The Guardian. The Stan Winston School of Character Arts (a top school for make-up and body art, says Emma), featured her work on its website, and well-known people in the industry started to take notice.
"I always see myself as very lucky, as I've been doing well for a while and I've been doing wonderful work for the past few years anyway, but in terms of becoming mainstream and being in the media, it's definitely picked up
"I've had more commercial jobs as well and I still do entertainment work, either make-up for a large performance team or for meet-and-greet characters, things like that."
The tarantula was featured on the Paul O'Grady show and Emma was also asked to paint a model to blend in with the set.
"That was good fun, with the lighting and cameras, because it only works from one perspective."
For Emma, it's not just about painting pretty pictures. There's a meaning behind her work. She has another series, called Mindsets, "which is a lot to do with illusions and stories and how we see the world".
She said: "I tend to create pieces to push what I can do and don't worry about where they're going. I like things to have depth. There's a reason why certain animals have been chosen. Whatever I do, there's usually a meaning behind it."
She also uses her talent to support various charities and causes she believes in. "I think my favourite thing this year is that I've been able to support certain campaigns that I was already a supporter of, but now I can play a part in raising awareness. I do a lot of projects with Leicester-based Rethink Your Mind. And for World Toilet Day, I made a lady into a toilet. That was brilliant, and a lovely challenge.
"It's important to me to support causes like this. Do you know, 2.5 billion people a year don't have access to good sanitation, so to make people aware of the cause, it's brilliant. To use the female form to do that... things like that have been fantastic."
She was also commissioned by Macmillan Cancer Support to create a teapot and teacup, a mug and a cupcake, as part of the charity's annual World's Biggest Coffee Morning event.
"Macmillan were brilliant. They say, can you create this as a body art piece I say let me have a think about it. And I could.
"I also did a giraffe again, this time for the National History Museum, live, for people to have pictures with it. Another favourite for me is that I've now been featured as an artist schools will study. That's lovely."
As well as her artwork, Emma also teaches musical theatre and drama, running after-school groups in Leicester.
"It's all kind of within the same realm," she says. "Fine body art is very theatrical. It all ties in well and means the theatre I create is quite different as it has art elements in it.
"The teaching is something I've done for so long now and I still enjoy it. It's great getting kids engaged in theatre."
For the New Year, Emma has a few projects, "some interesting pieces," that she's working on, although she can't say too much at the minute.
"I'm playing around more with making people into other things," she says. "A lot of illusion perspective work, painting 3-D objects on to people, playing with concepts and the meanings behind things. Camouflaging people."
Has she ever been asked to paint something she couldn't do?
"Hmm, no. I've not had anything impossible yet. It would be interesting to find something, wouldn't it? But I'd always have a go."
Follow us on Twitter: @MoreLeicester