Tagged: avant-garde

Beauty: Aurum

Check that azure accent

 

My thoughts behind this weeks look was gold, if you have ever studied my photography (you haven’t, no one has ever) then you may have noticed that I hate photographing gold. I prefer my images to look like they were shot in the depths of winter, even if there is flare flying around, and bokeh coming out the ying-yangs my images tend to always look a bit cold. I think its because i prefer the way blue tones come across on film (or on digital I guess). So with this week I wanted to challenge myself a bit, and shoot a considerable amount of gold. I shot with yet another familiar face, dancer, poet, artist, queen and bad a$$, Jahra. I’ve worked with Jahra numerous times before, on my personal instillation project “Genesis”, her performance art project “Murdered Many” and filming spoken word down at 1885. She is needless to say one of my favourite people on earth just because she is so cool. Like actually if you haven’t met Jahra you probably think she is real cool, and if you have met Jahra you probably think she is real cool. She also happens to have a very strong sense of personal style, to the point where she has looks that are  difinitively her… She is like Madonna, Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga rolled into one in terms of personal iconography. She also happens to be super open to my ideas, and interpretations of her look which excites me a lot.

OH ALSO YEAH SHE IS REALLY BEAUTIFUL I’M GOING TO STOP GUSHING NOW (THERE ARE PHOTOS AFTER THE READ-MORE)

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Beauty: DeMonica

 

Sometimes, I experiment with makeup and I hate it. Sometimes I experiment with makeup and I really like it.

I was really bored today, so I did the usual looking up of recipes online, playing of video games and listening to music for like 10 minutes before becoming bored. I’ve been toying with the idea of this look for a while now just in the back of my mind ever since (now I’m gonna go all gay and obscure on you for a bit) drag performance artist Raja (also known as famous makeup artist Sutan Amrull) released the artwork for her latest single Zubi Zubi Zubi (image below) and it made me think about how  when someone just paints their face (insert colour here) for Halloween or whatever they usually go out and buy the cheapest crappiest $2 face paint from the variety store (I say variety store now because i feel “one of those cheap Asian shops” is maybe a bit racist?), they slap it on haphazardly leaving gaps in places and blah blah blah, its effective I guess but it normally looks like absolute shit. What I initially wanted out of this look was to use really nice skin-like products i.e cream makeup, but a combination of budget and “I don’t wanna wait to get paid, then go to bodyfx and find out that they don’t have it or its not quite the shade of (insert colour here) that I want, wow disillusioned now, send to back of brain cabinet” forced me into doing this a lot sooner and a lot less polished than I had anticipated. Back to Raja and Zubi Zubi Zubi, the reason I was so inspired to this by that image (which is below by the way, I haven’t forgotten, I’m getting there) is because it veers so far away from that super matte, flat, patchy gross Halloween skin and ends up looking smooth and beautiful and creamy and like real skin.

Raja – Zubi Zubi Zubi

So I quickly had to change my aesthetic from this super polished, alternate version of Raja’s Zubi face to a dressed up Halloween face. Not necessarily looking like real skin, but at least looking anything but flat and boring.

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Beauty: Cedric

Cedric's Natural face

Cedric’s Natural state

I’ve done a bit of makeup work with Cedric before. But its previously been either keeping everything super natural and really just a bit of minor adjustments (contours, highlights you know the deal) or flirting into the feminine, drag world (drag used used in the purely acronymic sense of D.R.A.G – “Dressed as Resembling A Girl” and less in the show girl, drag queen sense). This time around i wanted to stop flirting with the idea of the female persona and actually do a transformation on Cedric. I have strangely enough only ever done one full-on  male to female transformaion on a man other than myself and it was the first time I had ever done one on anybody, myself included and I was only doing it because I had to (yay beauty school), needless to say it was not great.I did manage to avoid using glitter though, go me! So for me I guess this shoot with Cedric was really an experiment of my own skills and of what I could do with Cedrics face with the… well, limited supplies I own (I also don’t own any typical “drag makeup” or theatre makeup).

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