Steel skin
After 15 hours and thousands of deft brushstrokes, all captured live for the benefit of her Internet audience, Calgary artist Kay Pike transforms herself into Superman
“I’m one of those art class nerds that would go and eat lunch in the art room and hang out with the art supplies.” KAY PIKE
CALGARY— Kay Pike stands in front of a giant lit mirror, dabs her brush into a glob of paint and touches it to her skin.
She’ll repeat the motion thousands of times over the next 12 hours as she transforms herself from a willowy blond artist to the dark-haired Man of Steel for a throng of Internet viewers.
“We don’t talk about gender roles on my channel. In fact, when people say you should paint yourself as Superwoman, I’m like, ‘No. I want to paint myself as Superman,’ ” says Pike, who, when she’s done, looks like she could have been ripped from a comic book panel.
“It doesn’t matter. When you’re painting a canvas, you’re not thinking this is a girl canvas or this is a boy canvas.”
Pike is a fan of cosplay in which participants wear costumes and fashion accessories to represent a specific character from anime, comic books and cartoons, video games or movies.
Twice a week, she spends up to 15 hours turning her body into a different character for an Internet audience, using body paint and latex.
“I’ve been painting my whole life. It kind of comes easily to me, but it’s a lot of practice and hard work too,” Pike, 28, said at her Calgary studio.
“I’m one of those art class nerds that would go and eat lunch in the art room and hang out with the art supplies.”
After sitting as a body paint model for a friend, Pike realized she could still dress up without having to make a costume. “It’s magic.” She posted a video of her first solo effort on Reddit and it caught the attention of Twitch.tv, a live-streaming com- pany in San Francisco.
Her sessions are a mix of reality TV and info-tainment. There are contests for signed prints or balloon animals she makes on screen.
She receives a little advertising money, but relies more on donations from viewers to offset her costs and from Patreon.com, a crowdfunding site for artists.
Superman is a favourite of her husband, Moose, who narrates, reads posts from her followers and runs things behind the scenes.
She said it would be boring and lonely to do the painting without an audience, which is an equal split of male and female fans between 18 and 38.
“At the end, it’s a little sad to wash it off.”