How to Apply Heath Ledger Joker Makeup

Roger Bennett Riggle: Hello, my name is Roger Bennett Riggle and I am a professional, licensed makeup artist. I have been a makeup artist since 1985. I own a company called Faces by R & R, and we supply makeup, consultations, on-location shoot, makeup labor, and things like that through our company.

So, we turn to fantasy makeup, and Halloween today and we are going to shoot a series of makeup techniques, simple enough for you to be able to do and to actually transform your face into a Halloween design to go with your costume.

Now we move on to a design that we are going to call, the scarred joker. We are going to do a joker face that has a deformity to it and we are going to try to create something for you that would be easy for you to copy and extremely effective for Halloween.

Let's start with the products that we need for a scarred joker face. Again, we need the cotton pads and the astringent to wipe down the face because again, we are going to be using molding wax, which we have already done a segment on, when we did making a wound. Here is the molding wax and don't forget that it comes in light and dark colors, depending on your skin tone.

With the molding wax, we use either a very dull kitchen knife or a makeup artist spatula, palette knife. Also, we have got colors here, and the joker is basically in white. This is a clown white, this is a cream based makeup. We can also use, if you prefer a water-base cake makeup. This is a cake makeup and it's in white. There is just the remnant of it left right now, this is my personal one and you can dig a wet sponge in there and pat on the makeup and get the same exact design for the white face.

Also, we are going to sink in the eyes and make them rather black or dark grey and in that case, I have picked out a dark grey and the black color liner and a cream to use, and we are going to make the mouth red, but I decided that we will make it not red and make it different. So, we'll use a shade that we are going to call dark teak. This is an orangey red. So, it's not quite as red-red as a clown red would be, and so this is going to give us a more kind of slimy look.

So, you want to select your colors and again we are going to use the molding wax, and the Vanessa and I, before this shoot sculpted some pieces that we are going to put on the side of the mouth. The idea here is that the mouth is rather deformed for this particular joker face. We are also going to use liquid latex, which is the liquid rubber that we talked about and I have a little palette on to which to pour the liquid latex and use that. You will also a need a non-latex sponge and the makeup remover or the baby oil, don't forget, is a product that we use to mold the wax and keep it from sticking to us, and then we actually molded them on this little piece of plexiglass, which is the palette. You can also the use plastic plate, and then what I just discovered was, when I dip the palette knife into the makeup remover, I was very easily able to run it up underneath the molding wax and lifted it up, off of the piece of plexiglass and not ruin the design of the molding.

By the way, the molding of wax and making pieces on the face is called moulage, and that is a French term meaning to mold. So, it's actually to take wax and to mold. So, the process is called moulage.

Now, we'll jump to applying these prosthetics and showing you exactly how to do them. A lot of this is repeated in the wound segment that we did, but we will be applying these and then I am going to show you a new technique for using liquid latex when applying makeup for your joker Halloween costume.