Childs-play and the Carnival

The Alternative Miss World  events have had themes for most of their shows and since they encourages creativity we were given the theme of "child-like". This was meant in the way that children see objects completely differently to adults. A cardboard box may be a spaceship and a roll of tin foil may be their astronaut suit.

I started thinking about costumes that kids films had and how fun they looked. From this I looked at events such as Rio's Carnival and Mardi Gras. I absolutely loved the bright colours and how fun they all seemed. I'll definitely be looking further into these events as I would love to create a costume based on them looking closely at their headpieces.

The morning of the Liverpool trip

It's 5:55 AM. I'm cold, tired, nauseous and every inch of my body aches. I could shed a tear I feel that crappy. If Liverpool isn't very good I might actually cry a little. As much as I'm looking forward to it, I also really love my sleep and no doubt will be getting a little grouchy later on when I'm even more sleep deprived. Good luck to the rest of the group.

Tribal Make-Up

 Inspiration from Wilder Mann made me want to look further into tribal face art. I really like the patterns and the colours as they're applied as though the features aren't there.

I found editorial looks devised from tribal looks but i preferred the originals from the tribes themselves.

I quickly sketched down some ideas I had using oil pastels. After deciding what colours and vaguely what kind of patterns i wanted i created some more defined sketches. When i'd decided on the design I wanted to use I then chose to use normal acrylic paint for this. I chose this from looking at Boo Ritson and Alexa Meade's work. 

I'm really happy with how it turned out and wouldn't change a thing. I'm happy that I decided to give the face a grey base as it adds to the tribal look.

Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World

As we'll be starting a new brief at college soon I've done a little research. Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World started in 1972 where it was held in Logan's studio in Hackney. As the years went on the shows got bigger and themes were introduced.

1975-Wild

1978-Circus

1981-Royal Imperial

1985-Water

1986-Earth

1991-Air

1995-Fire

1998-Void

2004-Universe

2009-Elements

2014-Neon Numbers

The show embraces the "anything goes" culture with contestants being encouraged to dress up as anything they like. It has been described as "A riotous, queer celebration of the art of dressing up, the competition sees men and women disguised as telephone boxes, poodles and fried eggs. Anything goes."

The mask: an update

I wanted the background of my mask to be a grey-like colour so I researched and did some swatches of the kind of colours I was thinking about.

I painted my mask a basic grey around the main area and then a blue-grey around the base to create the sense of depth.

I began adding the detail I wanted to the mask around the eyes, nose and cheek bones. I still need to add further detail and add a wig to my mask.

Talons are harder to make than I thought

So my idea for adding talons on to my fingers for my Wilder Mann costume didn't go according to plan.                                                     When I was adding the clay it was extremely difficult to reach around each finger as they were so close together. I got the idea then to do each finger separately. I got one of the thumbs from one of my broken casts and tried my idea on that. it worked so much better that I'm considering cutting my other cast so I can work on each finger separately. 

Hands and falling fingers

I was introduced to the material alginate and really wanted to work with it for some hand casts. I decided i was going to make one, add clay to it so it looked like talons then paint latex on to it. After doing this i planned on attaching the latex on to a part of my body so that it looked like it was coming out of my body or was attached. I got this idea from looking at wilder Mann.





I really liked my initial cast because the alginate gives you a really detailed cast. Unfortunately I had pressed me fingers into the bottom of the bowl so the tops of them came out flat. Despite this I find the first cast interesting because of the detail, you can even see my fingerprints. I also like the position of the hand and how it's curled up.

(Photo of curled up hand) 

I started changing the position of my fingers in the alginate because of my idea so that they were straights. However after I'd allowed the plaster to set and was taking the alginate off the fingers kept breaking off due to how fragile the plaster was. This happened 3 times before my final cast. 

(Photo of broken fingers)

For my final cast I took longer, a lot longer, to peel away the alginate. An hour later, I had my final cast ready to start building! Now to wait for the clay to arrive...

(Picture of the final cast)