Cuts, Bruises, Gashes Oh My!

I have been fascinated with the art of stage makeup for a while now. In other words, I love creating fake injuries. It started out with a simple cut, then once I perfected that I moved onto bruises. I create these wounds using a little watercolor set I have. I've made skinned knees, gashes and burns. One day I was watching a special feature on Lost Season 2 that talked about the makeup they did for the TV show. The segment showed how they applied this white pasty stuff so that they could paint the inside of the wound and it looked like it was deep. It made me curious as to what other substances I could use. That's when I noticed a bottle of glue on my desk. I started doing what looked like gashes. I used glue, which made the skin look stretched, my usual paint, for the gash part, and olive oil, which I put on the gash once I finished painting. The oil makes it look wet. It was very fun experimenting and trying new things.

Yesterday my friend Ventana came over and she decided she wanted a cut on her leg. I made a gash on her leg and one on mine, once her mom arrived we explained that we were trying to skateboard down the hill together on one board and fell off. To make a long story short, she only realized it wasn't real when we all burst out laughing. When Ventana went home she told the same story to her dad, who also thought it was real.

I decided that I wanted to do something a little bigger. So, I painted a long knife-like wound on my upper leg. I applied glue, olive oil and more glue. Then I thought, well why not make a glue piece of skin separately and put it over the whole thing. So thats what I did. On a sheet of palette paper I made my piece of skin and let it dry. My mom suggested I try using matte medium so I made a piece out of that to. Once they were dry I tried both "on" and realized the matte medium worked better. I asked Greg if he could mix some paint to look like my skin tone then I painted the white matte medium over the top. After much retouching I decided I had done all I could for the day. It turned out good, but next time I have to smooth out some bumps in the matte medium a little and the skin color was a little off. It still turned out pretty cool. I'm looking forward to experimenting a lot more in the future and maybe one day I'll be on some DVD explaining how I did the makeup in a movie.