By Eric Schucht

“It’s cold. It’s weird. It’s fun. It’s different.” That’s how Tamica Michelle described the first time her entire naked body was painted. “You don’t know what to expect, and it’s ticklish.”

The Sacramento model has volunteered three times to become a human canvas for Sacramento airbrush artist Rich Diltz. Their most recent session a few months ago was personal for Michelle. Splotches of Pan-African colors blanketed her skin. A raised clenched fist —the Black Power salute — was handpainted in the shape of Africa on her back. 

For Michelle, the ​​Juneteenth-inspired design and photo shoot represented Black pride in the face of discrimination. “I was literally raised on the streets of Detroit. So for me, I knew what struggle meant,” Michelle says. “And that’s why it was so important for me to do this … it was just about having that dark past and finding the light.”

Over two decades Diltz has painted several hundred people. Sometimes he is hired by businesses to paint exotic dancers, booth babes, and on one occasion, a pornstar. However, the shoot with Michelle is for his passion project that aims to “increase joy and take on shame.” 

Creating this living artwork for Diltz “has been about empowering people about their bodies.” He tries to highlight people’s outer-beauty through body paint while building up their self-worth through thoughtful conversation. It’s a collaborative process between the painter and the model. With Michelle, Diltz recalls how “her eyes lit up” when they discussed doing a Juneteenth design.

“We have fun and we play around on the surface, but when I can really dig in on something like that, that is the magic to me,” he says. 

‘Why would I keep him from doing it?’

On Linkedin, Diltz calls himself a “Chief Imaginer.” In practice, he’s an artist who makes his living as an event entertainer. He and his wife, Sofia Diltz, operate their business The People Painters as a team effort. 

Rich Diltz said he is “a go-to guy among the party planners” who want something special. He brainstorms interactive art activities to run at get-togethers, mostly corporate events, and bar and bat Mitzvahs. In the past, he’s created custom T-shirts and hats, airbrush tattoos and a mobile graffiti wall for partygoers to paint. 

Sofia Diltz manages their subcontractors and is a no-nonsense problem solver. She said the couple has a good cop, bad cop dynamic where her husband is easygoing and she screens out anyone sketchy. “He’s just not aware of certain things,” she says. 

Painting people was a side venture for Rich Diltz that never panned out commercially. He still gets hired to do those kinds of jobs a few times a year. For the most part, he does it for fun. He works with models out of his garage studio to transform them into living works of art.

“When I do the body paintwork, it’s a creative outlet for me that I desperately need sometimes,” he says. “And it’s replaced my social life.” 

But it’s something he wouldn’t do if his wife wasn’t supportive and encouraging. Sofia Diltz said her husband has a “captive audience” when he paints. His fastest paint job was under 30 minutes. Most take about an hour. His longest was a detailed race car suit that took 10 hours to finish. So there’s a lot of time there for the artist and model to chat. People can be vulnerable when they’re fully exposed and often open up to Rich Diltz about their lives. 

“I know how amazing he is at it, why would I keep him from doing it?” Sofia Diltz says. Her husband is a safe space she’s willing to share with others. “The art is the experience as well. It’s not just the final product. Who wouldn’t want to talk to this guy for four hours?”

‘Paint me up, baby!’

Diltz is a college dropout whose first foray as a working artist was using watercolors to face paint kids as a fun activity when he worked as a day care teacher. His first airbrush was a gift from his wife so he could paint his “old beater car” like Fozzie’s Studebaker from “The Muppet Movie.” His car died before that could happen, but he used his present to make and sell custom T-shirts at the local flea market while his wife face-painted by hand. 

Diltz realized he could use airbrushes for face painting after reading an article on a similar practice used by makeup artists on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” With stencils, the couple painted faster and more accurately. Their reputation grew. And one day Diltz was asked to paint an entire person. 

“The first experience was a little … odd,” Diltz said. He was working out of a costume shop basement for Halloween when an exotic dancer asked if he could paint her nude. “I said yes because I felt that I was ready. I was not.”

The dancer showed up with her two kids, handed them off to Sophia Diltz to watch.“I was not happy,” she recalls. Then the dancer took off her clothes and said, “Paint me up, baby!” Diltz admits it was not his best work. He lacked the experience and the confidence to pull it off, but he kept at it.

These days Diltz takes the photos for this project, but he has also worked with Sacramento photographer Dan Hood. They first got in touch after Diltz made an online post looking for photographers to work with. Hood was interested and the two agreed to meet. 

Hood says he was skeptical of Diltz at first and worried he might be “a pervo-type.” Some men use Playboy-style and glamor photography to meet “hot young ladies.” They are “more about getting the model naked than they were about creating art.” After the two met, Hood realized Diltz wasn’t like that at all. 

“He was seriously into the art of it,” Hood says. He feels Diltz’s work is eye-catching without being overtly sexual. “He wants to ride that PG, PG-13 range. So even though it is painted, a lot of the models are still fairly within normal bounds that wouldn’t freak people out.”

For Diltz, this art project is his way of uplifting and empowering people about their bodies. He’s worked with cancer survivors, trans-women and women who have had double mastectomy. Some of the people he’s painted have become friends. Michelle enjoyed their talks and appreciated his life advice. 

“He’s the perfect dad,” Michelle said. “He talks about his family in a way that you will wish you were adopted by him.”

Diltz doesn’t know what the future holds. He’ll continue to make art and run his business, and at the same time, he wants to push boundaries with his art and break down taboos around nudity.  

“If more people saw naked people every now and then, it would probably give them something to smile about,” Diltz said. “And it would also break down some of this guilt and shame we carry around all the time.”

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19.