The Age of Ultron

It's been a while since I've done a more complex artistic makeup, but unfortunately inspiration wasn't knocking at my door. Then this week's Style Saturday came along with the Avenger's second movie soon to be released and I thought "This could be fun".

I tend to like villains way more than super heroes, always have. While everyone's super excited to watch the Avengers saving the day on screen, I'm all "Meh... when does Ultron get here?!"

my reference picture

As with cosplay, when doing a character makeup I tend to chose 1 reference picture to follow and that's it. Many characters look different depending on who drew them, or the lighting, the situation, etc. By choosing 1 picture (and 1 picture only) you'll have a clear reference to base yourself off of, instead of making compromises and trying to make multiple references match each other.

I thought of doing Ultron from the comics, but the new movie version has so many little intricate details that I just couldn't resist trying to replicate. Especially the sunken circles bellow the cheeks.

I knew I couldn't just slap on some makeup and hope for the best with this one, so I got my little block of facecharts and got to work with some coloured pencils. When trying to translate something like this onto a human face it can get pretty tricky and proportion is key to making it look good. The biggest challenge is obviously his lack of a nose, but that's something we obviously have to disregard and just hope people will concentrate on the other bits of the makeup.

Also, when working on something like this, it's especially important to test out your materials before hand. I tested about 5 different combinations of products to get the right orange for this. I needed something that was opaque enough so it would show up on top of the silver background.

I also tested out what made the best shadows over the silver product. I ended up using black eyeshadow (for the lightest shading), black lipstick for medium shading (it acts like a grease paint, but wasn't as pigmented), and a black grease paint for when I really wanted to darken up the shadows.

The full list of products is as follows:

- Make Up Forever Aqua Cream in "Silver"
- Black Liquid Liner from Penneys (Primark)
- Black Eyeshadow from Wet n Wild

- Limecrime lipstick in "Styletto" (I do not support Limecrime, but I am using up what products I have)

- Ben Nye black grease paint and "Fire Red" grease paint (both from the Ultimate F/X Palette)

- Sugarpill eyeshadows in "Buttercupcake" and "Flamepoint"

- Snazarroo white facepaint

Headpiece by Bullhorn

Hope you like it!

iDig

I've been MIA for a while but it was for a good cause! I've been busy busy busy and will be updating here slowly but surely.

From the 2-4th of April, the iDig Festival was happening here in Dublin and I got to go as a photographer! Pretty nifty, huh? I went to photograph Classroom Battles' gig, more specifically. They played their own take on some Sonic the Hedgehog songs, it was beyond awesuuuum. <3 Seriously. Impossible not to dance along to.

Some of my favourite bits of the festival were getting to watch The Triforce Quartet (twice!), Neal Acree's panel (he's a composer at Blizzard), and the DIT Irish Traditional Music Ensemble's take on game music. There were some very beautiful moments throughout it.

The Triforce Quartet

Neal Acree & his panel. Omg inicial stages Blizzard CGIs!

We had an amazing time there, it's just a shame the festival wasn't really promoted or publicized, so not a huge amount of people went. The public did seem very targeted, though, and lots of musicians and composers attended, which is pretty cool.

The guests were truly lovely

On the Saturday the main attraction happened, Video Games Live. I've watched them 2 times before back in Brazil and my boyfriend had seen them 3 times already. We actually met at one of the VGLs, so it's kinda special to me.

It was really refreshing to see a female conductor taking the lead of the concert. I grew up on classical music and opera, but had never stopped to realize that I had actually never seen ONE female conductor. I hit me like a bucket of cold water when I saw Eímear Noone and realized this. She's a conductor and composer at Blizzard (can she get more awesome than that?) and conducts the Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses Orchestra as well! She composed the theme for the latest WoW expansion and it's absolutely GORGEOUS. We got to listen to different versions of it being played by different artists throughout the festival, which was pretty awesome.

I hope to see her again at the Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses Orchestra here in November!

We had a great time and really hope the festival returns next year!