Conclusion..

Further more I have learnt during my first year of studying at Solent that there is so much more to my degree then meets the eye. In a way I appreciate the theory side because it really helps to get my brain to work, think deeper and think more meaningful about my creative choices. I have also learnt a lot of life lessons which I believe will reflect into my work over the next two years. 

I am excited to see what the next year holds in store for me, I now know what is required of me on my course and how I can achieve better grades, grow as a creative and inspire myself more as a make up artist. I also now know University is the one place that I am going to be able to be my most creative and I can do that by applying more time in to my studies by researching until I can no longer research haha I just need to remember to back up every creative choice I make. This summer I have come back with a clearer and a stronger goal of what I wish to achieve from my degree. 

I know I am going to take everything on board from my feedback and improve on this as much as I can in this years units, I am excited to get back to wig making as I had dabbled in this at college and it really excited me. I also want to attempt to collaborate with more of the students from other courses as I know this will give me a real sense of working with other talents in industry. Another thing I am hoping I will have the confidence for will be to apply for more make up experience when it is posted to us, I need to take this experience whilst it is available to me. Oh and one more time management is the skill I need to improve on, I know I am perfectionist and terrible with my time, these are sometimes bad qualities for a makeup artist. I will work on this for sure!

Lets see how much of this I can do!

Naomi xo

Summer 2015

To be honest, I didn't do a lot over the summer, my favourite things were Imats and going to Rome for my 21st birthday. Imats was incredibly fun this year, the demos were great and the discounts were even better haha! I treated myself to a few things I wanted for ages and a few bits for my kit. Ive been for the last couple of years and I go with my sister! We loved it once again! I saw Neil Gorton again and he created Frankenstein's bride. Here's a few pictures of my favourite time of year :D

Seeing all the body painting this year has really inspired me to attempt to do more of this, the details were incredible and I know why people say the body is a great canvas. 

At the end of May I also was taken to Rome for my 21st birthday. This was incredible and I had the chance to have a look at the designer and Italian make up. It was a lot of fun and seeing all the culture, architecture and food was my highlights. It was my little summer holiday and it was fantastic, wish I could have stayed longer than 4 days! 

Reflection..

When I started back in September of last year, I was feeling all sorts of emotions when coming to Southampton, but more importantly when I went to Uni for the first time. After visiting for an opening day in the previous October, coming back to the university again, reminded me how excited I was to learn all of the exciting aspects of the course. But to say I wasn't nervous, I would have been lying. After being set a summer project to basically identify what I wanted to achieve out of this course, I came up with being a practical freelance make up artist in preferably fashion, editorial, or beauty make up. Creating my own range of make up/beauty products (which I am determined will happen one day.) and working with some of my make up inspirations, one being Alex Box, world known make up artist who's work is innovative and breath taking, now we got to meet some of her colleagues from her Illamasqua team, which is good enough for me so far haha!

So after the first week was finished and the fun was out of the way, the hard work begun. Now I'm not saying it became boring because I enjoyed the work, tasks and projects both practical and theory throughout the year, but it became serious. To be honest, I thought I've got three years here, I have ages, but it is definitely something that flies by, I think it's safe to say I can't believe I'm about to begin my second year of university. 

Our first project was The Contemporary Elizabethans. Now the idea of this project was to create our take of The Elizabethans but doing it in a contemporary style, we were shown the historical side of this topic in seminars and mainly focused around the reign of Queen Elizabeth. We then had practical lessons where we would learn certain hair techniques because it was very apparent from the beginning of the research that hair was very important to the Elizabethans. We learnt how the hairstyles had changed throughout the century and how the 'celebrities' of the time influenced the trends of hairstyle, make up and fashion, a lot like how trends are set today by celebrities. I decided to look into a fashion and beauty make ups of today especially focusing on work from Pat McGrath from fashion shows and autumnal, royal colours.

During my design process I kind of stuck to my first idea through out the whole process which was big fluffy hair and golds and dark burgundy colours. The only think that really evolved was how I was going to design all of this and make it look Elizabethan but yet not letting the contemporary take over too much that it completely shadowed what we were set to achieve. 

We were given a partner and told that we would become the models for our own designs. Which to be honest stunned the group to begin with but in the end became clear to us what our tasks were actually set, it was to show us that we aren't always going to be able to complete our own designs as make up artists as we would need to work as a team out in industry normally applying someone else's design. This gave us an insight into how it could be working in industry.




This was my final design of make up for The New Elizabethans project, I kept the skin really fair and the cheeks very blushed  which is something that the Elizabethans did back in that time period. They also liked a dark heart shaped lip, I took inspiration from this and looked towards autumn/winter fashion shows and how the make up was achieved, there was a lot of dark burgundy and golds. I chose to create really smoked out dark gold, brown eyes, something that would make blue eyes pop. My model/partner had to create my look on me and I loved how it turned out.

The hair was just as fun, but typically we ended up doing it a lot better in the practices haha! We used crimping techniques and padding to create the look and using white face powder to add a little something to the look.



We worked wonderfully as a team and I believe we both were very proud of our work. 

We then moved on to my favourite unit of the whole year, Gothic Horror! For this unit we had to create the well known fictional character Miss Havisham. This was a lot of fun because it gave us a chance to explore the Victorians and all their rituals to do with death, when Gothic Horror was created and what made the Victorians scared. Overall this is the type of thing I love and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We also had to create another character either Pip or Estella. This was also a continuity task  to see if we could recreate the characters again for as if we were actually working on a film set. Here are my final images.


Miss Havisham


Estella 

We then had to create a contemporary modern version of Gothic horror using a scenario given to us and then a TV show. I chose the Vampire diaries and this is my final images.


Claudia 


Quentin

During the last year, I am proud of all my practical work. I know what I can do to improve though and that is allowing myself more time, I feel like a lot of my work was rushed towards the end, and I think that shows. I mean everyone is there own worst critic and when I look closer there is things I would change like the blending of the latex pieces and some of the colouring. 

Moving on to the theory side of things, I believe this is wear I lacked enthusiasm, being out of education for two years, I really lost motivation for writing and explaining my work.  The blog side of things was hard for me to grasp at first, to constantly document my work (even the bad bits) was difficult for me to do, but by the end I figured out why we had to do it, we needed to learn from our mistakes and in turn I think I have. Last year I learned it was very easy to fall behind because of the amount of documenting we had to do. This year I plan to update my blog daily if not every couple of days so I don't forget anything. I know I need to be able to show my progression more and my research, I love researching but I'm terrible at writing posts about it. 

Back to Southampton..

Well the time is coming where I end working at Gatwick Airport again and head back down to Southampton to begin my second year at Southampton Solent University studying the only thing I could ever have imagined having a career in, Make up and Hair. Over the last year I do think I've grown as a person, not just in age but in responsibility. With living away from home, fending for myself, making friends, celebrating my 21st birthday and also the most important part, starting a degree I have learnt being in charge of myself is harder than I first thought but after spending the last year at Solent I can definitely say I have learnt a lot, academically and especially in life. 

After already studying a NVQ level 2 of Media Make up. I already had lot of the skills that were taught last year, but what I did learn was there is always room for improvement, being given the chance to redo certain areas as well as being encouraged to constantly evaluate and judge my work to get it to a higher standard. I also loved the fact how creative we were allowed to be, it really stood out to me that what ever we were thinking we were encouraged to write down and take inspiration from whatever we could, being from architecture or important time periods of history. Over the last year I really believe my creativity has grown to another level, I cant wait to see what I am capable of achieving this year. 

Naomi x