Wear a Mask of Yourself - Final Images

 Since my mask was my makeup but emphasized my final image had to capture the application of the makeup. I wanted it to portray the application of makeup as if to go on a night out, which is why I wore my nice wig instead of just exposing my gross hair. Though I think I could have put on a different outfit to reinforce the look.

The pictures are taken in a bathroom mirror as this is the general make-up application/getting ready area for most. The way the edge of the mirror and other bathroom stuff is included in the image helps to set the scene for the image but I feel like my positioning is better in the second image as that's how I generally stand while I'm doing my makeup, leaning into the mirror so I can see what I'm doing a bit better whereas in the first image I'm more slouched, so to me it looks rather unnatural.

The second image would have been perfect if there had just been some of the shelf, or bathroom stuff around, as it would have given some extra context to the image. I'm not sure you could even tell the image had been taken in a mirror if you didn't know already. In this image the eyes are definitely looking more into the mirror, so this helps to make it look like a natural process, the first photo's eyes seem to look slightly into the camera though this may just be the way the band is bending.

Wear a Mask of Yourself - Making and Doing.

I didn't plan the face to look like this when I started my prototype, I planned to have two separate bands for the eyes and lips but when they were laid out it was too funny to resist trying out. When flat this mockup looks great! It's funny but also terrifying and maybe a little cute, definitely sassy as anything and captures my 'chronic b****face'. It reminded me a lot of Alex Pardee's work. However when it's worn on a 3D face, such as mine, the eyes wrapped around far too much and a lot of the charm it has from the front was lost. 

Trying to get the eyes to face the front was a challenge. At first I tried moving the lips down, using string on the back of them and the base to attach them, as it would allow me to move the eyes more central rather than too far on the sides, however this did not fully solve the problem. Since I wasn't sure how I would combat it further, I asked around to get ideas off others. Molly suggested a concertina that would make the eyes spring out forwards instead of being firmly stuck to the base. This did help with the wrapping problem but, as you can see in the second picture the eyes sprung off to the sides. 

Since the winged eyeliner on the eyes was so big I was able to stick the inner corner to the base which I was delighted to find made the eyes face forward and stick out off the edge of the base as I had initially designed it. 

The small eyes looked really freaky! Definitely like something out of 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' and although the way they looked was great I didn't think they exaggerated my eyeliner as much as I had imagined in the design process. The bigger eyes still irritated me somehow, they had the exaggeration but not the freaky factor! There didn't seem to be a happy medium between spooky and the emphasis I wanted. In the end I created an eye that was somewhere between the two in size, but tried to keep it kind of creepy looking by elongating the pupils. The extra pink on the lips was added to give a cartoon implication of a shine on them as if wearing gloss, I just thought it would look cute and add a little bit of charm to the mask. 

Wear a Mask of Yourself - Initial Ideas & development

The initial ideas for my mask started from jokes my friends make about me such as 'dad in eyeliner' and 'Sean Bean', hence 'winter is coming' but I wanted to choose something more characteristic of my appearance. A lot of my initial ideas focused on the the makeup I wear, (winged eyeliner forever) and although a couple of ideas focused on other aspects of my look, (the hair on the left side and a set of giant stretched ears not pictured) I found myself coming back to the makeup as it was fun to mess around with the proportions of it, and I think that it is a defining feature of myself.  

  

 Initially I did want to do something really out there and wacky looking. An idea I liked in theory was a crazy spiral that would wrap around the head and support the facial features. I thought that this would hide parts of my face that needed to be covered but would also look interesting as it wouldn't cover the whole face and leave pieces of flesh peeking through, which might have given a spooky kind of Tim Burton-esque feel to the mask. In practice however it absolutely did not work. Below are pictures of two ways I tried to create that effect, first by wrapping a long strip of paper around my face and and secondly by cutting a spiral from paper and trying to configure it around my face. As you can see there were technical difficulties with both methods so I had  to change the idea.

Strip of paper

Spiral

I'm glad that my initial idea didn't work out as it prompted me to find a new way of affixing mask to face in separate 'bands'. In the sketches above I had drawn out several bands so it would create a similar effect to the spiral but found when the facial features were added there was just too much going on, the different elements detracted from each other. Since the make-up was what I wanted to emphasize in my mask I cut the design down to only include one band for the eyes and one for the mouth with no unnecessary extra bits.