Dark Artifacts: On makeup, wounds and bruises

Thursday, June 3, 2010

On makeup, wounds and bruises - A short walkthrough

Today I took part in a very fun boredom-busting rainy day project with my best buddy and his girlfriend. Basically, I did the makeup for a gory photo shoot. The goal: beat up a bit the girl and hang her with fish hooks going through her skin.

Now, being obsessed with body modifications & piercings, if I was the model, I would've filed the barbs off the fishhooks, pierced myself with a sterile piercing needle and run the fish hook through it. But the lovely Mirenda isn't as masochistic as me, so I had to find a way to do this without harming her. It was pretty easy.

First of all, take a before shot of your model. Having a kitten in the picture helps attracting your audience. Promising a kitten at the end of the post helps keeping your readers hooked. Thus, keep on reading, and you won't see one, but TWO pictures of cute kittehs.

Here's what I started wif:

Cute girl, cute kitteh, everybody's happy. Now lets get to work. To stick on the fish hooks, all I did was lay a layer of liquid latex on her skin, when dry I dropped the hook on it, I put a latex soaked piece of toilet paper over this, and smoothed everything out.

Once dry, it was just a matter of applying makeup. I started with a flesh base color, and added a bit of orange, yellow, green, brown, black, white and purple to give a nice bruised look. I use grease makeup, the cheap pallettes you can by at walmart around halloween, and apply it with my fingers to heat it up so it blends well.

As you can see, I also used a toothpick to put a bit of darker, burgundy makeup (a mix of black red and purple) where the hooks came in/out to add "volume".

Ok, I might have overdone it! It'll look better with fake blood. My fake blood is easy to make; I stick corn syrup in a small glass bowl, add lots of red food coloring, instant coffee ground (ONLY USE INSTANT COFFEE!), a bit of soy sauce and corn starch (for opacity). It creates a thick, opaque, vivid fake blood, which is also comestible, so don't be afraid to stick it on your actor's face.

Now that's getting closer. Not enough blood, though. We'll correct that later.
For the moment, I applied the eye makeup. Lots of runny eyeliner first. Then, using purple, yellow, green and black, I created bruises on her face, arms and legs. I used a mix of brown and black, lightly scratched on her face, to make her look dirty.

I then applied a thin layer of liquid latex to her lips; once dry, I rubbed it so pieces of it got torn off and stuck together, creating a very convincing chapped lips effect, which will be made even better with the light application of brown and dark red makeup.

Looking better already, huh? I then finished the makeup by applying fake blood to her nose, and spraying her face with water to make everything runny and dirty.