Sunday, August 2, 2009

Gothic Fantasy

A few days ago, Evichu from La Colorópata posted a gorgeous look inspired by a painting by Victoria Francés. I instantly fell in love with the eye make up - so I decided to do a recreation of it:



Of course, this is not an exercise in creativity, but it's a good training for technique. First of all, I had to keep in mind that I am recreating a painting, which is not bound to the laws of reality-but my make-up is, so I couldn't do a 1:1 recreation of the picture. Second, texture plays an important role in this painting. I had to think how to best recreate the tear streaks and the shiny texture of the eyeshadow in some places. After applying MAC Bare Canvas, I painted the whole lid in black with MAC Carbon, going slightly lower than usual. To get the shiny purple effect, I wetted my brush and applied MAC Plummy wet in the middle of the lid. For a little bit more shine, I added some MAC Brow Gel on top of Plummy. In the outer corners, the colour is drawn out in a v shape and smudged to get a slightly messy look. On the rims I also added some Plummy to get the purple outline for the black. I also used lots of Carbon along the lower lashline, and deepened the black with Catrice Metallic Eyeliner. To create the tears, I used some actual water drops, but I am not too happy with how they turned out. For once, the water always followed the same track... Next time, I would try a different method for this.

The waterline is painted with black kohl, and the mascara is CG Lash Blast (no false lashes this time, because this look is playing rather low on the lashes). For a final touch, I used a small brush and dabbed some Platinum on to recreate the tiny small dots on the original painting.

If you look closely at the original, you will notice that the right eye is less ornate than the left one, so I just used a wash of Plummy and some mascara there. Now the make-up is complete, but since I am recreating a painting, now comes the second part: some darkroom work is required! I used both Photoshop and Lightroom during editing. First, I adjusted the gradation curves to lighten the picture. Then I used the brush tool to create an even base, on which I later used the diffuse glow. To create the iris effects, I coloured them in purple, lowered saturation levels and heightened brightness and contrast several times until I got the desired transparency effect. Finally, I added a white vignette in Lightroom. And this is the final result:



And some eye close-ups without all the effects:





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