My fourth studio shoot was for the character of the Wolf in the story of Little Red Riding Hood. I have never attempted a wolf make-up before so I always knew that this look would be my most challenging. I designed the look of the wolf to be mainly human looking with some small elements of a wolf, this unfortunately became the most challenging part of the look, as it was difficult to create a balance between human and wolf. The whole look took around an hour and a half to achieve as the hair had to be placed on in small parts at a time, this inevitably ate into my shooting time and left me with less time to shoot then I had initially hoped. Another difficulty I faced within this shoot was the second cancellation from my photographer, by this point I had already shot on my own another one of my looks so I felt slightly more confident taking the pictures myself however using twenty minutes to set up the studio space again took away from valuable shooting time. This has taught me to always be prepared and organised for your shoots and if possible to have a second back up plan if anything does go wrong.
Here are some of my favourite images from the Wolf photo shoot -
Make-up
The make-up and special effects for this shoot were by far my most difficult and challenging. I began by creating a darker skin coloured base and brown eye shadow for contouring the cheeks, jaw and nose to give the face structure and add darker tones to the skin. I then used latex and cotton wool at the top of the nose to create height between the eyebrows and nose and to give the wolf a more evil look. However when I then used brown supracolor to colour over the white of the cotton wool the colour stuck to the latex and created a dark, blotchy effect and made the make-up look messy, upon reflection I don't think that this technique adds much to the overall look, if I were to do the look again I wouldn't include this element of the make-up. Once I had the base and contouring done, I began to add the wolf's fur, with a limited budget I used wool roving to create the fur - the wool was a light brown colour and on the skin it looked ginger so I used a brown hairspray to create a darker more natural fur - with a larger budget I would have bought more realistic fur from a reputable makeup company. I then used spirit gum to stick the fur on, little bits at a time, this became a very messy process as the spirit gum began to stick more to my hand than the model's face. I was very weary as to how much fur to put on the face, bearing in mind the more human elements of the look, I choose to just have fur on the eyebrows, side of the face and the temples. Upon reflection after editing the photos I am happy with the overall look of the wolf's character and although I faced many complications this look is my favourite so far.
Props
To create a realistic wolf look I bought and hand decorated wolf fangs and ears, without these I feel the look would have been incomplete. The most difficult obstacle faced when faced with the props was trying to blend the prosthetic ears into the natural ear skin as the prosthetic ear only fitted half way down the ear - most of the blending had to be done in editing with the smudge and clone tool. Again a difficulty with the fangs was the unnatural white colour of them, I tried to stain them both with make-up and blood but nothing would stick to the slippery surface of the fangs, however in Photoshop I have managed to edit them to create a dark, stained look using the paint brush and opacity tool. My favourite of all the images are the ones with the blood in the mouth, here I used a blood capsule which dissolves in the models mouth and momentarily fills the model's mouth with blood, I've got some great shots with this and the blood really adds to the violent, gory and evil atmosphere I hoped to create through the character of the wolf.
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