Kisari Demon

Summer is usually the best time for Demon photo shoots, but this year things just weren't working. I had two models that just seemed to flake off on me, another was just really busy, there were days where the weather turned completely sour, and things were incredibly slow business-wise early summer making doing anything fairly difficult. I got a few shoots done, most were interior shoots that could've been done any time of year, so I haven't really been able to take advantage of decent weather for shooting outdoors.

Luckily, the weather has turned decent again and I had the chance to work with a new model, we just did a random wandering about town kind of Demon shoot, nothing too overly thought out, but I'm really happy with it turned out.

The Ghoul

This was my attempt at a much different shoot than I usually do, something a little more horror related. The idea was a botched medical experiment trying to fuse Demon and Human DNA, or something like that, and the result was a broken, almost diseased looking freak.

The whole shoot was a bit of a challenge, for starters making something with the intentions of it being creepy looking is way harder than it seems, it can easily be silly or campy or just too over the top to even recognize. With the main face there's one giant eye, we realized right away once we got to the location that eye was making it look way too alien - which for me, ruined the whole thing - so it was a challenge with the lighting to draw attention away from it and towards the "normal" eye.

With the "normal" eye being a little sunken looking, it also proved way more a challenge to make sure that eye was at least somewhat visible without over lighting the shots and ruining the creepy factor of them. I didn't think we really got anything after 45 minutes of shooting.

This one actually looked terrible when I first took it, it was way too bright and as far from creepy looking as it could get but after adjusting it turned out to be one of the better one of the bunch.

Once I was sure I got a few good ones to really show off the makeup, we stumbled upon this lighting setup and just do played around with the character of the makeup.

It was a 3 hour (or so) makeup job, about 14 prosthetics, fake teeth, a contact lens, and lots of gauze. The main face prosthetic will be going online for sale pretty soon as well, it's a larger piece, probably more suited to seasoned makeup people as it might require a bald cap.

The Witch

This is outside what I normally do, I've always said I don't do old age makeup, witches, skulls or clowns - and for the most part I will never do most of them, at least not for my own purposes, photo shoots or to sell on my site. However, I recently watched Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters again and I was reminded how awesome, and unique, a lot of the witch makeups looked and was inspired to do one of my own.

I didn't stray too far from the character of Muriel, the main evil Witch played by Famke Janssen. i wanted to keep it simple and pretty basic, so the overall form is just an exaggerated face, then added some cracks in it.

Something I haven't done in ages is to really try to do a clean makeup. I'll admit, I've been pretty sloppy with a lot of my makeup job in the last while, relying heavily on photoshop to clean them up. For me the point isn't about doing a camera ready makeup, but creating the final images, so I don't feel like I'm cheating just being efficient with my time.

This time I felt since it was potentially so simple, I'd actually make the effort to make it as camera ready as possible, and with the except of one seam along the left side of the mouth, it was nearly flawless - and with more effort would have been perfect. So I'm glad to know I haven't completely lost my ability to do makeup properly.

The piece used will be available for sale soon.