Costume Makeup - Applying the Detail

Roger Bennett Riggle: Hi! I'm Roger Bennett Riggle and I'm a professional licensed makeup artist and my model today is Vanessa Strickland. We are doing a scarred joker, a deformed type of joker character from the Batman comic strip. We've already applied the molding wax to make a more deformed looking smiled mouth and we have applied and not smoothly a water-based cake makeup all over the face, but we want it kind of broken up. We don't want it silky white smooth like, we would do a clown and/or a mime type character. So, at this point we're going to start to paint in some detail and what I'm going to do is to choose a grey. We're going to make the nose dark and the eyes dark, but instead of using a black, I'm going to use a dark grey because I want to play with some more and different colors with this particular character. This is a dark grey. So, it won't be so black. Remember, when you're working underneath the eyes, have the person look up and when you're working over the eyes, they can look down to the floor or they can close their eyes.

Let's add just a few little eyebrow textures just to give it a little characterization. Now we'll do the other eye. I'm going to do some see these brush strokes I'm doing on the nose, woo, woo so that it's not solid and animal looking. Remember, we painted it all in black for the animal. This is kind of like you breathe smoke, dark black smoke.

So, a lot of times we need to do a makeup, you kind of want to make up a story with it. Why not? We will make it look a little distressed by pulling in through here. We get some downward distressed, sickly, weird, depressed kinds of look. There are a lot of those little tricks that you can do to make someone look like they're really ooh, ooh.

To pop the eyes a little bit, I'm going to take just a touch of white and I'm going to paint in the eyelid. I'll just tap a little makeup on the eyelid. This is a technique we also use in beauty where we press on a very light color, sometimes it's shiny, sometimes it's not, but this technique we press the makeup on either a powered eye shadow or a cream and this is what we call popping the eye. Whenever you put a light color on the eyelid, it pops the eye for you and you can see where that's really pop that eye out with a little bit more definition for her.

Now, with the white brush and of course you can change to a brand new brush. I'll wipe all the makeup off the brush and now I'm going to dip it in this deep orangy red color and I'm going to be painting the mouth and I don't want the mouth to be very pretty. I want it to be irregular and deformed. So, I can come across here, I can do a kind of a mess up there. I can make the lip -- this is asymmetrical. So, one side will be much different than the other. Then I will try attempt to make the mouth kind of this big by filling in the crevices of our molding wax here. You can see quite a bit of the time when I'm doing lines and stripes and stuff like that on animals, features like that, I use long definitive strokes, but a lot of times when I'm creating and designing and playing, I'll pat because the pat kind of makes an irregular shape and I can start to put it where I want to and refine it later if in fact, I need to. Let's make -- since we went up high on this side, let's go down low on this side so that the mouth looks diagonal.