Barbers & Bloody Treats

After many weeks of threading, knotting and tweaking on beautiful fine lace, we proudly finished our moustaches and were very excited to apply them on our partner’s face. Penny led our class on Wednesday, teaching us how to cut, shape and style our moustaches. We then used spirit gum to adhere the moustache and other facial hair such as eyebrows, chops and stubbles. The transformations were very refined and quite amusing. We had Alex as a cowboy, Azrielle as an old man, Alexis as a gangster, Zeb, a dashing Olde English Gentleman, and me, a bikie. However it was Rachel who stole the show as our favourite hero, Super Mario! We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and were sad it was over after weeks of hard work.

Thursday’s lesson had us once again behaving like children in a candy store, except that our candy was red and gooey! We began our very first lesson on Accident Simulation experimenting with different types of blood, our illustrator palette, grease bases, powders, adhesives, and scar materials. We practiced making basic scars, cuts, bullet holes, bruises, and boils - a tiny bit gross, but still very enticing! We are eager to explore this part of the course in more detail in the following weeks.

Natalie Rose - Student

Glamour Dilemmas

In a crash course in black and white photography, we were taught to be able to recognise how the shades and tints of various colours would convert into the grey-scale, creating the look for the black and white photos.

As Tuesday arrived, so did our professional photographer Gavin, and our beautiful models. After we created our natural and high fashion looks, our ‘standby kit’ skills were put to the test during the photo shoot with only a few mistakes (I forgot the lip gloss). Gavin and Louise both helped us to identify what we need to be looking out for on our models, as well as the correct lingo to call out so our perfect photo shot wouldn’t be ruined by us standing in the way.

While the glamour part of the week finished the fun was nowhere near over. Nick and Paul took us into the workshop to start our foam latex runs for our prosthetics, with the importance of temperature control, measurements and timeframes being made clear to us. With two goes at it, we were able to make our ‘Hero’ prosthetics. To finish off the week we were introduced to airbrushing. While some of us soon managed to create masterpieces, others mastered the skill of splattering - I think I need a little more practice...

Alexis Lynch - Student

Exam Make-ups

High Fashion & Fibreglassing

The class arrived back from the production break this week and got straight into high fashion. We started out with an explosion of colours doing period-inspired looks, from Egyptian to 1980's. Nat was the diamante queen this week producing beautiful work!

Tuesday, we continued with high fashion looking at more avant-garde catwalk looks and Thursday we had a prep/practice day for our photo-shoot. Experimenting with costume, hair and makeup designs before the big exciting day.

We had a great couple of days in the workshop as we delved into the fibreglassing of our sculptures. We applied layers of polyester coated fiberglass sheet over our plasticine sculptures to create a negative mould. A day later we cleaned out the moulds and they are now sitting strapped up happily in the oven at 45 degrees to remove toxins. We are all so excited for the next stage!

We had a lovely end to the week celebrating Louise's birthday, Mariel's 3rd place at IMATS New York, and Alice now heading for NZ to work on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.

Alex Guillot - Student

Body Art

The last week before production break was certainly a busy one! Tuesday we did our body art, that we prepared for the day before. Our models looked amazing! We couldn't thank them enough for coming in during their free time and standing still while we painted on them for such a long period of time. A big thank you to Fiona for helping us throughout the day.

Then Thursday was the big one: exams, yikes! We all did well in our practical exams, recreating film characters and period looks in a short time frame, but we’ll just have to wait and see how we did in the written test. We also handed in our completed paper mache masks and research assignments, all of which looked fantastic. We all really thought outside the box when it came to presenting our research assignments in a creative manner.

Now we all just have to wait until the 2 week production break is over so we can get started again!

Rachel Greening- Student

More Make-ups