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All dressed up

Meet the people behind Paintertainment's whimsical costumes
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Living art Paintertainment combines costumes and body paint to create a whole new kind of wearable art. Photos submitted

I feel like a bit of a creative hoarder."

Cary Campbell Lopes is describing her family's home-turned-workspace in Black Tusk Village. There's a chandelier dress hanging from the ceiling, a bird cage skirt in one corner, a life-size totem pole in another, up to 100 headdresses and costumes depicting peacocks, mermaids and mountains. "We've got two storage rooms upstairs which used to be the kids' room and our room. On top of that, I have a sewing space and an easel painting space," she says.

It's been a slow accumulation over the last several years since Campbell Lopes and her husband Paulo started Paintertainment. The company provides models decked out in elaborate costumes and body paint to serve food, entertain or just spice up the atmosphere at events and parties. While the couple can reuse their handcrafted costumes on occasion, they often have to create new garb to fit a theme — hence the hundreds of pieces crammed into their home.

"We went over there a few months ago before summer started to see what they had," says Andrea Mueller, visual arts programmer with the Whistler Arts Council. "It's a wonderland of costumes in their house. It's crazy. They had so much going on in there. The rafters have skirts and dresses and wires and hats. There are mannequins everywhere and they have costumes on the go... It's like a very, very fun dress-up shop. We were like kids in a candy shop."

But their home wasn't always so whimsical. The couple started out as graphic designers and worked in Hong Kong before moving to the corridor. (Though Campbell Lopes completed a foundation year of arts studies as part of a four-year college program and Paulo has taken airbrush courses.)

"When we first came out here we found the whole graphic design side, there wasn't much demand," she says.

It wasn't until a friend asked that they paint him (Paulo is a longtime airbrush artist) for a loony race that the idea for their business first came about. The friend didn't win the race, but he managed to scoop first place in a costume contest. Interest began to build from there.

Their first contribution to the annual ArtWalk came next. "We decided we would paint a living mermaid," Campbell Lopes says. "The girl we used, at the time it was her dream to be a mermaid. We thought, 'Why not?' The guests could come view us painting her, plus she was a great photo op. We had a background set up too."

The mermaid was a hit and Paintertainment has been a part of the event ever since. "The Whistler Arts Council incorporated (our models) into the ArtWalk and they'd take you around to venues... Then it went into decorating two of the arts council members who were working as guides. They're the women in red."

Part of the appeal of Paintertainment is their boundless creativity, Mueller says. "No one I've seen does anything quite the same as Paintertainment," she says. "It's very unique. I don't have to give them creative directions. I know they're going to produce something incredible."

The pair has also been busy with the village animation program this summer, for which they unveiled a new costume with an interesting twist. "We did a running water fountain girl," Campbell Lopes says. "It's a working water fountain. She was positioned outside the Brewhouse in the trees."

The costume features a model painted to look like stone with a similarly earth-toned fountain dress attached to her and a small pond at her feet. Streams of water shoot from spouts on her chest and the water is cycled through the pool. "That's our latest costume," she says. "By the time we got through trial and error, the costume cost us around $2,000 and we've used it for one weekend."

The reactions to their statue models — who start out standing still and are often mistaken as actual statues — have been priceless though. The company hired Aude Ray, a local artistic jack-of-all-trades, this summer to pose and perform in one of those costumes. On one occasion she began singing. "It was almost like the little mermaid," Campbell Lopes says. "It was beautiful. Another day we had her painted up as a stone statue, sitting at a pillar base with her harp. She slowly started strumming her instrument and she made up a story about being made of stone."

But, as you might imagine, business in Whistler is limited. To that end, the company has secured an agent in Vancouver to help them drum up jobs beyond the Sea to Sky. "The agent commissioned us to do a (party at the Commodore) and after that he was really happy with what we had done," Campbell Lopes says. "He puts us forward to do a lot of events."

Unfortunately, though, their elaborate costumes have been too cumbersome and delicate to ship to far-flung places so far. (Although they're set to travel to Edmonton for a Lion King-esque party for CN later this month.) For example, one dress features slots for 88 champagne glasses while another has several tiers for cupcakes. (That one was featured at jazz singer Michael Buble's wedding.) Besides that, they like to choose the models with whom they work and be on site to fit them.

"We don't want to be just body painters. We don't want to just supply costumes. We're always striving to do something that would be difficult to be copied. We were online recently and Googled our candy table. We came up with someone who copied us. The same with the Michael Buble cupcake dress. They copied it exactly," she says.

It might be tough for others to come up with original ideas, but Campbell Lopes says she's constantly stumbling upon items that spark her creativity. "It could simply be something I've seen in a store," she says. "Today we're creating something for an Indian wedding. They have 300 glow wands to give out to their guests at the wedding and they said, 'What can you do?' We were trying to think of a way to hang or create a fairy dress using 300 glow wands."

She goes on to describe their complex solution involving several bags of steamed corks and belts. "It's quite rare if we have brain freezes," she says. "It's usually too many things coming in at too many angles."

Recently their creativity was rewarded at an industry event for the movie make up company Studio FX. Paintertainment was the only company to showcase work at a VIP party. They displayed their candy girl — which is among their most popular costumes — film strip Marilyn Monroe models and the champagne dress. "We were submerged in the industry for one night," Campbell Lopes says. "People came up to us all night long. Paulo doesn't like the limelight, so he was almost in hiding. It was an amazing response we got from all these make up people who have been in the industry for so long."

To check out more images of their work visit paintertainment.ca.