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
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.
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