Sunday, December 30, 2012

Peacocks & Bananas: Costume and Make-Up Art

The other thing I've been really into in lieu of painting and drawing-type art is costumes. One of my favorite parts of going out is getting the opportunity to do dramatic make-up (it's the little things). Due to my love of dressing up, and the proximity to my birthday, Halloween is perhaps my favorite holiday. Last year I frightened people with my Edward Scissor-hands make-up:




A lot of people I knew passed by not recognizing me. This year I decided to go as a peacock, which turned out to be no small task. I did a practice run with rainbow peacock eye shadow, which turned out pretty well.







...but, instead I decided to try the techniques in this YouTube video entitled Peacocky! My version didn't look as good as the one in the video, and in the end I kind of prefer the above rainbow eye shadow.







The costume itself took hours and was pretty expensive, but was fun and turned out really well.



Gathering materials (and cats)....



Measuring the tail....



...and the end result!



I already had the sparkly dress from an awesome goodwill find from years ago, and I purchased the sparkly gold tights for the occasion.  The arm warmers I made myself by just sewing tubes from costume fabric, hemming them, and sewing in thumb holes. I made the tail by tying the feathers together with twine, decorating the back with ribbon, and using blue ribbon to tie the tail on in two places, which keeps it upright. Sort of impractical for crowds and cars, but impressive looking nonetheless!



Peacock & Captain Hammer at Holocene in Portland on Halloween




Soon after Halloween, to commemorate the upcoming release of the final season of Arrested Development, some friends of mine threw an Arrested Development party. I went as Mr. Bananagrabber because my friend had left her child-size banana costume in my care (don't ask). I re-used my gold iridescent tights from the peacock costume and paired it with a black t-shirt and miniskirt underneath the banana suit. I used a Banagrams bag as my purse and for make-up I did yellow eye shadow with black winged eyeliner. Black winged eyeliner using MAC Fluidline in Blacktrack is my new obsession, btw.






It's not very often that you have an excuse to use yellow eye shadow, especially with my pale complexion, so I enjoyed it for that factor at least. A guy dressed as gay sailor Tobias won best costume, but he was also the host, so that's probably for the best:)





I get a lot of ideas from YouTube, if you haven't noticed, so that is a great place to look for make-up and costume tutorials. In fact tonight I did a practice of this Starry Eyes make-up tutorial for my New Year's make-up tomorrow! See? I got lazy with the eyeliner because it's a run-through but the eye-shadow turned out well. Jasper approves.



I'll try and take a clearer, well-lit photo tomorrow to show the final result. 






My bathroom counter before and after a costume make-up session :)

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Sewing!

 I haven't posted any artsy things lately because.... well, I haven't been painting. However, I have been getting my creative juices going in other ways with.... sewing! My mom's always been a great sewer, and made a lot of my clothes growing up. I started to get into it when I was a kid, and even attended some of her quilting meetings with her (wow, I was a dork). Then in early high school I decided to make a cute summer dress, and I did... with a lot of tears and frustration along the way. After that I gave up on sewing for a long time. But I found a tutorial for the "Infinity Dress" a few years ago and have been meaning to make one ever since. The Infinity Dress is a circle skirt with a waistband and two very long straps that you can use for INFINITE ways to style (what a clever name). Here I've just shown one way to wear it, but you can find tons of YouTube videos and pictures of how to wrap your dress.
 I wore this one to a friend's wedding and got a lot of compliments. The clearest and most concise tutorial for it I've found yet is here on the blog Sew Like My Mom. The above dress was made on polyester type of fabric that stretches and hangs really nicely. That type of fabric is ideal. I made a second version out of jersey knit (below). It is nice because it's more casual, but unlike the former, it does wrinkle.



As you can see, my cat was super helpful during the sewing process. Guess he saw me working on the floor as an opportunity to cuddle.

And here, he was kind enough to hold down my pattern for me.....

I'll be posting more projects as I photograph them!