Marcy Maloy shoots body painted bathing suit story for San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com.

Marcy Maloy is known for her beatiful lifestyle photography. Sometimes her commercial jobs require her to photograph models on far-off locations sporting swanky designer swim suits. This particular swim suit assignment, however, required something far different from an exotic location and a designer suit. It required an almost nude, painted model at the MAC cosmetics training center in Emeryville California-sans surf and palm trees.

The story that Maloy shot these images for was centered around MAC cosmetics professional body painters. The concept for this assignment — a nine-hour task — was a steamy summer’s day on the beach with a beautiful, bronzed model in a tropical-fern-print bathing suit. The artists started painting at 7a.m. And finished at 4pm. Marcy and her crew got there at 2pm but didn't start to shoot until 5pm. The shoot wrapped at 7pm.

According to Marcy and her assistants, shooting this scantily clad model wasn't easy. "We had to move fast since we only had two hours and the location didn't have great light," says Maloy. "The shoot took place in a conference room at the MAC training center. The room had relatively low ceilings and very little natural light. The situation called for a manufactured lighting solution. We were a bit worried that with the hot lights the body paint would melt.

The model was shivering a little when we arrived so we turned the HMI (tungsten) lights on her and clamped a location jacket around her knees. People forgot she was standing around in her birthday suit all day! She was thankful for the heat.

Towards the end, the paint on her hips had melted a little and was bleeding onto the inside of her arms as they hung down. When the shoot was over and the makeup artists started rubbing the paint off the models backside it occured to me that we had been shooting a naked woman. The power of illusion is strange indeed!"

To read the entire story go to San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com.