(Beginning) Makeup Course Photos

Two years ago I took the only stage makeup course offered by my department here at Cal Poly. This was where I fell in love with the idea and the art of stage makeup. The class focuses on techniques that can be accomplished with basic supplies such as makeup, brushes, sponges, some basic work with liquid latex (no prosthetics), spirit gum, and nose/scar wax. Each week is spent on one makeup style; one day to practice and one day to create your final look (two hours per each day). Keep in mind that these techniques are for the stage and/or performance and look different when viewed from afar.

This first photo is from old age week.  I used a light base as well as creating wrinkles through highlights and shadows

 This is from clown week. I decided to go with a playing-card inspired character by using stylized representations of the different suits. Clown makeup can be tricky when working with solid white and solid colors - especially when powdering. For this look I applied all the colors with cream makeup, powdered with white powder, and then went over the red and black with powdered makeup of each respective color.

 Facial hair week! This week was a blast because the class was comprised mostly of girls. We learned how to treat and blend crepe hair and applied with spirit gum.

Horror! My goal with this makeup was to display different stages of wounds; the bruises are a few days old, the fork stabs on my left cheek are one day old, and the slice on my right cheek happened the same day. I will be exploring more gore/horror makeup in my current "advanced makeup" course.

For animal week I chose to be a mountain lion. After doing much research I decided to use my basic facial features to lay the cat's features on top of. 

The final project in this course was to apply a complete look on to a partner from our class. This was a new challenge because we could create anything we wanted, and for the first time apply it to another person's face. As a long time fan of Picasso, I decided to create a look inspired by one of his paintings: The Portrait of Dora Maar.  (seen below).

For the application I created a false nose out of cardstock. I filled the cardstock nose with paper sealed into the appliance with glue. I then covered the appliance with several layers of liquid latex (in retrospect I would have created the nose out of layers of liquid latex on a mold and then peeled it off and stuffed it). My model is closing her eyes in the following pictures.

 Here is another view of my application, from the front, to show more details of the makeup. This was the makeup that I was most proud of because I spent so much time on the piece and I think the result is quite similar to the original painting.

This week in my advanced course I have been working on bald caps! A post with a short tutorial, tips, and videos is coming soon :)