My first post in awhile! I was extremely excited when I discovered yesterday that the fabulous Emily “Thundermouse” Haltom of I Can Dress Myself is my neighbor. Naturally, the first thing I did was schedule an airbrushing date for today! My new neighborhood (SF’s Mission district) is rife with beautiful street art to use as a backdrop, so we didn’t have to go far to get some great shots.
My inspiration for this look was Promise Tamang Phan’s video tutorial “Advanced Human Robot” . I loved the clean lines of the robot look, and instintively felt they’d make a great outline for airbrushing. To achieve Emily’s look, I started by painting in the chestpiece with black Kryolan facepaint. It might have made more sense to lay down the pink paint first, but I was worried that the water based face paint might bleed into the alcohol/water based pink, and decided to play it safe. I stopped the outline at the elbow, rather than continuing onto the hands, to make the look more functional.
Once the outline was completed, I filled in each block with neon pink Graftobian body paint. For some reason I didn’t fill in the blocks on Emily’s arms- wishing now that I had, because the black on the arm blocks doesn’t match up with the rest of the design. Oh well, lessons learned!
I used a variety of different stencils to fill in each block. I had the best luck with my fabric stencils (lace, mesh, fishnet, etc), since it’s really easy to pull them tight over the skin to get a clean line. Once I’d filled in each block, I re-traced the outline with face paint so it was nice and dark again. I added a little white at the center of each shoulder piece to really make it pop, and used neon pink puff paint to create the “screws” holding Emily together ;)
The back was more of an afterthought. I used my trusty tennis racquet to blend out the edges of the pink that bled over from the shoulder and neck portions, and then added a row of elipses in black and pink to highlight the spinal cord. I really like that detail, it looks really industrial and cool.
Since this design had a lot going on in the chest region, I wanted to keep the face simple. Some pink eyeshadow, black eyeliner, and some stenciling around the eye seemed like enough.
Many thanks to Emily’s roommate Jess for letting us use her fantastic camera! The pictures turned out WAY better than they would have on my crappy pocket Canon. Now that Emily and I are neighbors, you can look forward to many more awesome photo shoots!
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