The Banshee

 While doing a quick product shot we decided to do an equally quick mini horror shoot.

And here's the product for for a new piece, the Drokkori Demon brow - it was designed to be a simple, versatile brow piece.

The Seer

This shoot got put on hold for a couple weeks following some major temperature swings that caused my very steep driveway to become a sheet of ice that my poor truck was unable to navigate safely, effectively trapping me in my house for a while. We got it sanded (last time it rained nearly hours afterwards wasting the effort) and I got out and we finally managed to do it.

The makeup was quick to apply since it was all pre-painted, the eyes were just painted resin with gloss (and some red strands of yarn for a bloodshot look) that popped into holes in the foam latex perfectly - they didn't even need to be glued so I was able to alter the direction they were looking a couple times.

The idea with The Seer is that through a series of weird experiments attempting to imbue a human host with the powers of second sight (an ability naturally occurring in a couple Demonic species) a young woman is horribly disfigured, although she did gain psychic abilities - the ability to see death, not just hers or the people in her immediate surrounding, but a constant barrage of images of death from every living being on the planet.

This piece was one of the more fun (and perhaps challenging) pieces I've made in some time. Based off a bit of production artwork from the MMO The Secret World (now Secret World Legends), it seemed a pretty easy thing to copy without straying too far from the original concept.

I didn't obviously copy it exactly, the eye placement and size is different, but overall I wanted to stick close to it, since I really liked it. I don't recall seeing this character in game, so I had no idea what the other side of the face looked like - and knowing I couldn't leave Kayla (the model) blind, I created my own take on what it might look like allowing her at least one good eye.

Adding the eyes was what made it work so well. I've never been good at making realistic eyes, but I figured they would work given their surroundings. I already had half-sphere moulds the right size so I made a bunch of silicone copies and used them as eyeball placeholder - popping them out once I was ready to mould it.

I then made white resin blanks, painted an iris and pupil, using strands of red yarn and a thick gloss whipped up a pile of eyeballs that just popped into place once the whole thing was painted.

I had to glue little sticks on the backs of them while I painted to making it easier to handle them and give them a gloss coating, the sticks were just snapped off once I needed them.

Once we were done I decided to pop by a local Halloween store (open only on Fridays this time of year) and we did a bunch of random shots there.

The Wailing Widow

I don't normally do horror type shoots, not that I don't like them, but they do fall outside the mythology that underlies everything I do (it's long and complicated so I won't go into just what that mythology is) although that's not the real reason I don't do them. I don't do them, because they're really fucking hard to effectively pull off.

I've written and re-written this too many times trying to make it concise and simple, but I really can't. So I'll just try this, for me horror is about setting a scene, it's about angles and lighting and the right environment, the right pose - if any of these are off, it doesn't work (again, at least that's how it works for me). So keeping that in mind it's much less fun of a process than my usual shoots and it becomes work, sometimes stressful and frustrating work.

However, this last shoot, which I'm calling the Wailing Widow turned out much easier than I had expected. I think because I warned the model that it might not be fun but actual hard work. However, after a few set up shots (in order to make her look like she was floating) it went really smoothly. I think because the makeup itself was pretty creepy and processing the shots in a high contrast black and white really helped. A lot of the pictures were cool, but once I processed them, they looked amazing - doesn't always happen, but it's so awesome when it does.

The makeup and character was heavily inspired by the MMO The Secret World, there's a couple characters that it comes close to looking it and I plan on doing a few more inspired by that game.

The story behind the Wailing Widow is that of an undead widow. While living she lived an opulent life with her husband in a mansion on a clifftop over looking the sea during the 18th century. He ran a fleet of ships that imported and exported goods around the world and would often be gone for up to a year at a time. Eventually there came a time when he simply never returned home and his wife, having already fallen ill, began a slow decent into madness as the years went by.

She would sit and wait for her husband to return every night while the house staff slowly plotted against her, growing frustrated as the money began to run out and resorting to slowly stealing everything in the house.

Finally, penniless and living in a massive empty house, she wandered the halls in sorrow until she finally died. It was some time before her body was even found.

She continues to haunt the hallways of the house on the clifftop where she once lived, assuming any who enter to be more thieves looking to steal from her.

They Live Demons.

This shoot was a long time coming, it was suggested to me last fall after my Demon Ash vs Evil Dead shoot. The biggest stumbling block were the damned alien masks and finding the time to make them. I knew I did want to deal with makeup on several people that might limit their vision and kill my back in the application process. I wanted to keep it quick and simple.

It ended up not exactly being quick or simple. The lateness of the season meant the weather turned a little sour and it's been raining, we had to move inside - which wasn't an issue for the most part, other than it was really warm and anyone who's ever worn a latex mask knows they're not exactly air conditioned.

In order to keep the aliens from smothering to death in the masks, we had to suss out all out shots ahead of time and keep things moving while it mostly worked, it did hinder any spontaneity, so while I was going over the pictures I kept seeing other angles that would have worked, but it's too late now and I'm happy with how it turned out.

The masks themselves worked decently, I did a little fiddling with some clear plastic to make the eyes, again to facilitate everyone being able to see what was going on.

It was tricky doing "action" shots since I wanted the makeup and the masks to be clearly visible, so it limited angles and all that crap. Overall I think we were successful in doing something silly and campy.