Orochimaru fanart by me!!

A guide to the culture surrounding face-paint in Sunagakure for my Naruto fic, Fade to Black! It should be noted that face-paint is not only limited to puppeteers— anyone and everyone can paint their face, including civilians! It's a form of self-expression, after all.

Originally, face-paint was simply stage makeup for kabuki theatre, but puppeteers adopted it onto their puppets for the recognizability of various characters, in that they can re-use a base puppet for another character in a different play without making an entirely new puppet simply by changing its paint.

Some people wear a Face for the artistry. Others, to nonverbally express a phase/event/period of their life that they're going through. Some people wear it in honor of a deceased loved one who wore the same Face. Usually, the younger a person is, the more often they will change their Face.

Shout-out to @greenekangaroo for a lot of the inspiration and "original" Faces!

Also, this is the first time I've drawn my OCs Rooster and Dragon! Kishimoto-sensei was a coward. If he was going to incorporate aspects of middle eastern culture, he could have given us more middle-eastern representation other than a single councilor. Maybe Baki was coded that way? I actually forgot about his face paint until just now as I write this lol, but if I drew him then he would go on the "Custom Faces" page right next to Rooster because Baki has a two-claw pattern on one cheek.