The little fat lady is just about done.  I want to work on her feet a little more and smooth her out a bit more, but she’s essentially complete.

The airbrushing piece is also coming along very nicely.  I’m hoping to have it completely finished next week.

I’m really liking the way this is turning out.  She’s kind of porcelain looking, almost ethereal.

I’ll work on her hair next, add some darker shadows to her body, do some detailing, and voila, it will be all done.  Oh, and I need to fix the place where the masking adhesive ripped the paper.  Grr.  It’s fixable though, and not in a terrible place, so I should be glad of that at least.  Anyway.  I’m quite proud of my second-ever airbrushed artwork, so far.

I made them for my Valentine, hence the heart.  They are supposed to represent the two of us – him as an arctic fox (being from the Great White North and all), and me as a lynx (they have cute tufty ears XD).  Not the most manly gift for a guy, I suppose, but he seemed to like them.

They’re made of fleece and felt, with mismatched buttons for eyes.  There is velcro on their hands so they can hold the little items I made for them, and they can hold hands with each other.  ^_^

Both of us wear glasses, so I made a pair for each stuffie out of pipe cleaners, though I kinda think they’re cuter without them.

Far from perfect, but making them was a learning experience, as always.  I might have to make more plushies in the future, as there are a lot of things I’d do differently, and the next ones will be so much better.  Still and all, I was pretty happy with them, and so was he, and that’s all that matters.

An update on school projects:

Finished my first piece for airbrushing class, and it came out pretty well.

I just need to seal it, and then I’ll get some better, portfolio quality, photos taken.

Here’s the next one I’m working on, a bride of frankenstein type of girl in a contortionist pose.  Contortionist girls are freakin’ fun to draw.

I wish I could have scanned the line drawing before starting the airbrushing, just in case it gets screwed up.. oh well.  I’ll just have to try not to mess up!

The first layer of airbrushed color: gray shadows.

now with skin tones

Yes, different parts of her body have different skin tones – she is a made woman, after all..

One of the other classes I’m taking this semester is Hair & Beards.  Currently we’re learning to ventilate hair for hair pieces and wigs (tying strands of hair onto fine mesh), and we’re sculpting little heads on which to learn to punch hair (like you see on rubber dolls).

The first project we did for that class, however, was laying hair – gluing the hair on with spirit gum to make beards and mustaches.  I was so resistant to doing it at first for some reason – I really did not want to do that project.  In the end I did a pretty good job on it, and had a lot of fun, as did my classmate who modeled for me.  He’s a little crazy. XD

Soon I’ll have pics to post of the sculptures I’m working on, of which there seem to be quite a few.  I think we’re sculpting something in every single class right now, except airbrushing class.  In process right now is a little fat lady, which will be done by Tuesday, the little head for hair&beards class (she’s going to be a catgirl ^_^), and a one-piece prosthetic that is the sole project for mold making class.  So much to do, and all of it is fun!  Loving school right now.

Here’s what I’m working on in airbrushing class:

What you see there was done in the second session of the class – just two colors, laying down the base shadows.  The airbrush is definitely a challenge, but I think I’ll get the hang of it in time.

Here’s the reference photo I’m working off of:

In moldmaking class, we’re doing lifecasts of our own faces.  Here’s mine cast in soft plaster:

This is just right out of the mold – it picked up every pore and fine line in my skin, freaking amazing.  Next I’ll clean up some little bubbles in the plaster and tidy the edges, then we’ll make a mold of that and cast it in harder plaster. The whole semester of this class is one project!

It’s an all photo post today.

My final projects for the first semester at special effects makeup school:

race change makeup for Cosmetic Makeup class

And a celebrity transformation - my classmate as Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz

scratches made with cabo-bondo for my Effects final

more cabo-bondo scratches

ramen noodle and latex "infection" makeup

the photo shoot. infected girl feeding on a hapless victim. sadly the pics didn't turn out very well.

I don’t have pics of the finished pieces for sculpture class, but here they are almost complete:

Toothless the Night Fury

werewolf girl

And then it started burning. In case I didn’t mention it before, putting red pepper on your skin is a pretty bad idea.. Now, the burning happened on my arm too when I did the first round of photos, but it wasn’t terrible, and this second time around I made sure to lay down an extra layer of latex under the spice mixture.  Well, apparently I missed some spots.  On my face.  o_O

So, I decided to forego doing the arm again, and just get the photo shoot over with.  ‘Cause.. ouch.

Anyhoo, here’s the pics I got:

It doesn’t look quite identical to the hand in the first go-round – the color is slightly off and I didn’t use as much of the salt and pepper or give it as much attention with makeup.. but I think it’s a fair job considering the fact that I did it on myself.  And I quite like the addition of the redness around the fungus that looks like skin irritation – that bit was inspired by the actual irritation on my face, which funnily enough had faded a bit by the time the camera battery charged enough to take the photos.  Go figure.

For my special effects class, our mid-term assignment was to do a makeup effect using food and then take photos that could be movie stills.  I had a bunch of ideas, most of them far too elaborate and physically impossible, and I tried out a couple of things that ended up not working.  Unfortunately at the last minute I had to come up with plan C, and I ended up doing an effect where the idea was that it’s an alien fungus that’s spreading up my arm, eventually to consume my entire body and eat my brain in order to use me as a meat puppet.

At that point I had to use what was on hand at home, since I’d already spent money I didn’t really have buying supplies for the stuff that didn’t work.  Crushed red peppers, salt, and black peppercorns combined nicely to make a creepy alien fungus texture.

The effect was made by sponging on a layer of liquid latex and laying the spice mixture into it, then repeating the process in key spots for more variation, then covering the whole thing with a green-tinted layer of the latex.  After that, I applied dark brown creme makeup in the holes and crevices to make them look deeper, did a little mottling with a couple of colors of creme makeup, and voila’!  Alien fungus.

Jenn and I took about 50 photos, trying out different poses and whatnot, and I’m glad we did so many ’cause the last ones were absolutely the best.

So, my latex alien hand is complete, and I’m rather pleased with how it turned out.

This was a project done for my Intro to Makeup Effects class – we were given a yellow latex kitchen glove and told to turn it into a wearable monster hand using liquid (and/or mask) latex.

Mine was made in two parts – the wrist cuff is a separate piece that fits over the glove.

The glove was made by taking every cotton ball I had in the house, ripping them into little pieces and rolling the pieces into different sized balls, then gluing them on the back of the hand with mask latex.  The texture on the palm was made by sprinkling crushed animal crackers onto wet mask latex.

After that was all dry, I coated the whole thing with liquid latex several times, making sure to fill in the deep crevices between the cotton balls.  That part took freaking forever.  I must have done at least 10 rounds of filling – the latex kept sliding out of the cracks and dripping down the glove.  Most inconvenient.

Anyhoo.  After the hand was coated with latex, it looked like I had glued Corn Pops cereal all over it.  I probably should have just done that, it would have been faster and probably would have looked the same.  And I would have had some yummy breakfast left over.  Oh well.

While the Corn Pop Monster was drying, I made the cybery wrist cuff.  It took some pondering to figure out what to make it from.  I’m a broke-ass student and all, so I really didn’t want to buy a bunch of stuff for the project.  I ended up using a piece of felt as the base for the cuff, and glued on styrofoam, plastic kazoos, stereo wire from the dollar store, and then I stuck bulbs from a christmas light necklace through the holes in the kazoos (they even light up!).  So I ended up spending two dollars on the whole thing, or $8 if you count the burger and fries that came in the styrofoam container.  Well, $10 if you count the burger plus the cotton balls and felt, which I had already had at home.

alien hand and cuff in process

The edges of the cuff were finished off with folded duct tape ,then the whole thing was painted with tinted latex and acrylic paint, then glazed and distressed to look extra crusty and worn.  Then I popped in the christmas lights and glued on the stereo wires, and ta-da!

The hand itself was painted with four layers of tinted latex – a purple base, and greenish-grey glaze to darken the cracks, a bright green glaze, and more of the bright purple brushed over the high points as a highlight.  Unfortunately, the camera didn’t pick up the colors of the hand very well.  In person, the green and purple pop really nicely and it has a nice depth to the color.

Anyhoo, there it is.  I’m pretty happy with it, especially because I was afraid, during the process, that it wasn’t going to come out the way I wanted.  But it did, and my teacher seemed to dig it, and now I want to make a whole costume to go with it.. if only I had the time.

OMG, what happened to my hand?!

Here’s two of the four projects I have in process at the moment, a clay maquette of the Night Fury from How to Train Your Dragon – with wire armature done, starting to get a layer of clay on it…

…and a latex “monster hand,” pretty much finished aside from some color layers and some mixed media add-ons:

I also have to finish up a sculpture of my hand, and a do a full-body makeup using food (and a photo shoot of it).  Busy, busy!

Here’s some of the other stuff I’ve been doing this past month:

1950s makeup - my partner for this was a dude, but doesn't he look pretty? XD

Chinese opera mask facepaint

Clay sculpture of Hit Girl from Kick Ass - kinda a combo of the movie and comic versions

Burn makeup done with gelatin - I need to practice this a bit more...

Fleece dragon scarf and paper wand made for the Harry Potter swap on craftster

Old age makeup

Pair of ears sculpted in clay

And last but not least, the finished version of the open mouth sculpture I posted in the previous blog entry.

This is the practice version I did at home.  I like how dead she looked, and that the stitches really seem to stand out on top of her skin.

This is the third iteration, which was done specifically to be photographed for a newspaper article…  and ended up *not* actually appearing in the article.  Boo.

For some reason, I had a hard time getting the base color right and made it a much bluer green, which is not quite as corpse-like.  The blue tone to the shadows goes nicely with her eyes though. XD

Happy Halloween everyone!