Children know her as the felt-hatted, pointy-eared elf who paints butterflies and bats on their faces at a Norfolk adventure park. But Cat Finlayson is also a renowned body artist whose stunning work on the bigger canvasses of whole torsos is winning her prizes and work across the globe.
She is celebrating a hat trick of successes at the Welsh International Face and Body-Painting Festival, where she won the “glitter body” section with a sparkling lizard on a male model's chest.
There were second places for a chameleon face on the same man, and two full body works, one a girl with a giant turtle on her tummy and two elephants on her breasts, another a wild “spirit shaman” with symbols of herbal drugs, and hallucinogens derived from frogs and toads.
Cat's two worlds of body art are galaxies apart but linked by a love of art, and a career which sprang out of her first job as a teacher and wildlife education officer.
The 37-year-old mum, from Knapton, near North Walsham, is best known locally for her work at the Bewilderwood adventure park near Wroxham, where she decorates the faces of excited children in just a few minutes.
It was something the trained science teacher with an art degree began when she worked at Banham Zoo as an education officer, giving feeding talks and encouraged to paint the faces of young visitors.
“I got basic training, found I liked it, starting researching it but found the books were not very good, so taught myself, and people liked what I did.”
She also worked for the Suffolk Wildlife Trust at Carleton Marshes, near Oulton Broad.
But just a year after turning pro Cat won the UK Professional Face Painter of the Year award and was fifth in the 2007 world awards.
Her talents are in demand across the world.
In Hong Kong, where she lived for a spell when husband Peter Wilkins was sailing manager for the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, she regularly leads a team of 20 artists painting many of the 40,000 crowd at the rugby sevens competition in designs ranging from kit shirts to Avatar fantasy creatures.
She has also run workshops in New Zealand, has represented the UK in Shanghai, has varied work ranging from music festivals and corporate events to weddings and glittery designs for competitive pole dancers.
“I can do children's faces in just a few minutes but full bodies can take up to four hours,” she explained.
Body painting dates back to ancient times when tribal warriors daubed on colour for ceremonials and to look aggressive in battle war, and had a surge in the flowerpower hippy era of the 1960s.
More recently there has been a boom in face painting in the past 10 years, with the UK at the forefront having had five world champions during the decade.
Cat's full body art can range from providing tight jeans that “look as if they have been painted on”, because they have, or apparently stripping away flesh to show muscles and sinew.
Her giant space turtle in the Welsh competition was inspired by author Terry Pratchett's “big bang” creation theories, and on the model's back there are two brains, a healthy one fizzing with ideas with its two hemispheres on her bottom, and a wizened diseased one between her shoulder blades, symbolic of the Alzheimer's disease the writer is suffering.
Cat said her full body models were not naked but wearing knickers and breast covers.
“Part of the fascination for me is designing a paint that doesn't draw attention to the 'naked' person beneath it,
“All bodies are beautiful but I know I have really done something when people go 'wow', only seeing what the model has been transformed into,” she said.