“Good morning girls and welcome to week four!” This was Louise’s greeting to us on Monday and it brought home with a thud just how fast this course is progressing. We had a full week ahead putting into practice all the basic principles we had learned so far. We had spent the weekend researching our looks for our television character. We then put up our research photos and set about turning each other into a Nurse Ratched type, a down and out prostitute, a stressed mother caught out shoplifting and a school teacher who was in jail for inappropriate behaviour! After completing each character makeup, we dressed our models accordingly and photographed them. We were all very pleased with the results.
Tuesday was about creating, a “no make up look” like what you might see in “Pride and Prejudice” etc. We soon learned this is the most difficult type of makeup to get right, especially for High Definition film! Perfect blending technique is required and it took much longer to achieve than other make ups.
We were very excited to see the wonderful Jane again on Wednesday who taught us all about colour wheels and the types of colour and its uses. She did a fabulous demonstration showing how this relates to makeup using warm and cool colours correctly. In the afternoon we were able to start on our paper mache masks after a quick demonstration and explanation of the techniques and tools required. I don’t think the class has ever been that quiet as we all sat, heads bent over our moulds, gluing madly! It was all very therapeutic!
On Thursday we were back out in the workshop with our clay friends. With encouragement and words of wisdom from Nick and Paul we were soon underway again and making great headway towards the finished sculpt, refining forms, making wrinkles look realistic and adding details we never noticed before. Once again the end of the day came all too quickly and some of us opted to stay longer and keep working on this fascinating component of our course.
Another component of the Master Class is “work experience” and I was lucky enough to be asked to work on a film shoot during the weekend. It was a fascinating adventure to work with professional Actors on make up and hair and to see how a film set operates on location. I worked with another makeup artist who was a graduate of Makeup Effects Group Master Classes and who guided me through the process and showed me how “standby” was put in to practice. We even did a little special effects work!
Candy Burgess - Student
