Green

The inevitable has finally happened; I now have a craft blog. I'm going to start off with something outside my usual domains and show you a makeup project.

My sister Leslie performed a piece from the musical Wicked, and naturally it fell to me to do her costume and makeup. I've never done full makeup before, so it was fun to dabble in a new medium.

Meet Leslie. This is her face without any makeup on it. I just pinned her hair back to keep it out of the way.

After one coat of face paint, she looked pretty awful. I used a water-based paint, and fortunately it layers up pretty well, so after another coat or two she was solidly green. 

Before baby powder (also blinking)

After baby powder

Of course, solid green was not the goal. Leaving it here would leave her looking gross and flat, like...well, like someone who's been covered in a solid coat of face paint. So I moved on to shading. First I dusted her whole face with baby powder to cut down on the weird face paint shine, and keep her eyelids from sticking to themselves at the creases. It doesn't come across as a very dramatic difference in the photos, but that step did a great deal to make the green look more like (un)natural skin.

Next I shaded in shadows and highlights with two colours of eye shadow. This gave her face shape and depth. I shaded in cheekbones, temples, jawline, and the sides of her chin, and highlighted her chin, cheeks, nose, forehead, and cupid's bow. I also shaded in her ears, which seems inordinately fussy, but they looked weird and flat without it. 

Eye time! Let me tell you, this girl is not used to people putting eye liner on her. It was a struggle, but we persevered. The lips I filled in with eyeliner for precision around the edges and sticking power, then put black lipstick on top for the shininess. 

And that's it for the face! Out of the pins, her hair covers her hairline where there's paint on her hair and some pink scalp showing through. 

Moving on to hands, here's another comparison of straight face paint (right) and face paint with baby powder (left). You can sort of see how the powder cuts the shine. We had painted her nails the previous day, so in this shot I've painted over the black polish with green in places. I'll clean it off later.

Before (right) and after (left) shading the hands with eye shadow. BIG difference.

The best part of costumes is the little details nobody will notice. I made this witch hat pin for her by colouring Sharpie onto a quarter and hot-gluing it to a safety pin. 

And we're done! Elapsed time: 2.5 hours for the makeup on the day of (not counting practice rounds before-hand or costuming). Bam.