When you have to do 30 people a night every night you get to really
play.
And you get really, really fast because you absolutely have to be.
Getting involved with cosplay is another good way to experiment. At first, probably by volunteering your services until you've got some work to show for yourself. If you're any good at it, word will spread fast and people will start asking your cosplay friends you've painted up who did their makeup for them. Next thing you know you've got some referrals for very interesting designs (albeit low-paying,
one-off gigs).
There's an enormous wealth of training videos for
stage and effects makeup on YouTube. Cirque even has some great videos available of their performers applying their own makeup before a show.
I'd recommend getting yourself equipped with a makeup essentials kit and starting out by going through the generic
Stage Makeup 101 projects (see below for a short list). You'll want a good table-top mirror with a built-in light around the mirror for all of the practicing you'll need to be doing.
Learn to do lots of research. Get your hands on lots of magazines and cut faces out of the glamour shots. Take bits and pieces of a design out of different shots. Study the subtleties of makeup design. What happens to someone's personality when all you do is darken their eyebrows? How does a design need to accommodate someone with an alabaster complexion version someone with a chocolate black complexion. How you do you put makeup on someone's
face who's allergic to creme-based makeups?
You'll be doing a lot of practice on yourself. Take a good head-on photo of yourself,
trace it in Photoshop or the like, and then print yourself out 50 copies of the sketch of your
face on heavier-than-average paper. You can paint your designs onto these sketches with liner pencils and creme-based makeup.
A lot of theaters will have the actors apply their own makeup. In this case, your
role is to create the design, identify what the performers need in their makeup kit, and teach them how to apply their design consistently each and every night before the show.
Learn about body painting with an
airbrush. Better yet if you pick your own kit up. This is an essential for full-body applcations.
Careful about applying too much makeup. As we said in my makeup class, "More is more." Sometimes it's better. A lot of times it's a desperate, last ditch effort to save an application gone awry. There's no shame in burning that s*** out your
face with astringent and starting over. Your pores may revolt, but they'll get over it.
--
When I took a
stage makeup class, I seem to recall our projects were:
1) Basic glamour makeup.
2) Making yourself look middle-aged.
3) Making yourself look elderly (lots of wrinkles, liver spots,
etc.)
4) Making yourself look like a celebrity you resemble.
5) Blood 'n gore. Write a really nasty story about how you got hit by a car and then attacked by a guy with a crowbar and then someone burned your arm with a cigarette and you got scratched on one side of your
face by a cat. Then smear your conceptual makeup design for this onto a piece of paper with a sketch of your
face on it. Then make yourself up like it actually happened.
6) Transgender. Make yourself up like a member of the opposite sex. Give yourself a moustache glued onto your
face with
spirit gum and
crepe hair, pronounce your adam's apple,
etc)
7) Cast a plaster mold of your
face. Use it to create prostethics. Then select 3-4 different animals and mold prostethics designed for each animal. Glue the prostetics to your
face and paint yourself up to look like each of the animals.
--
Closing note. You are your own best guinea pig. Try lots of things out. Take lots of photos of each makeup application. Don't be afraid to go around town in your blood 'n gore, trasngender, old-aged, or animal makeup. See how people react. Take note of how your personality changes almost instantly to match your makeup, and remember --
stage and effects makeup is often meant to be convincing from a hundred feet away. What looks exaggerated in a mirror inches from your
face may be perfect from the back row of the theater. It also may be not nearly exaggerated enough, especially if you're under dim or saturated lighting. Figure out when you need to ramp your application up to 11, or when you need to knock it down to 7.
Good luck, and god speed.
