Zombie Makeup

So I was thinking I wasn't going to have a zombie post this year, but I just can't let that happen. This post actually serves a specific purpose. Since I'm the one putting on Thriller this year, I also need to teach my newbie zombies how to do their makeup.

After 4 years of Thriller (and a run of CATS to boot) I know a couple things about makeup. I’m by no means an expert, but I get by.  So this will be an intro to basic zombie makeup. I won’t be doing anything fancy like prosthetics, but it’s easy to find instructional videos if you want to build on what I start with here.

A Thriller Zombie is not like a Resident Evil Zombie. The Thriller Zombie has been dead, buried, and decaying for years. Keep that in mind when planning your makeup. Decay happens unevenly so your makeup should be asymmetrical. Also, there should be no blood.

First off, supplies!!

1.       Makeup: I use Mehron makeup. They sell it in the seasonal costume shop on Maui, but it’s also available online.  I have two different kinds, the stick makeup and the tube makeup. I believe the stick makeup is cream-based while the tube makeup is water-based, so they don’t blend well together. If possible stick to just one type or another (I recommend stick over tube).

Mehron is really good stage makeup which is very important if you’re going to be sweating a lot. But it isn’t cheap. If you’re just doing Halloween makeup you could probably go with the cheap stuff at Wal-mart, but there’s always the chance it won’t blend well. If you’re going to be dancing on stage, go with the good stuff.

I usually use the Wal-mart $1 tubes for body coverage since it doesn’t need to be as precise.             

Colors:

Base Color: Green or grey are (in my opinion) the best zombie base colors. Brown could work though you want to make sure you look dead and not just really tan. Blue could also work, but I’d stick to a blue-grey so you don’t look like a smurf. Same with purple and Violet from Willy Wonka. Yellow is a possibility, but might end up being a little too bright. Sometimes I use the Mehron Zombie White as my base, though I usually blend it enough so it turns out looking greyer.

Avoid red. Same with fake blood. Wrong kind of zombie. Also, most red makeup stains your skin.

Red and yellow makeup should not be used near your eyes!!

Highlights and shadows: Black and white are great for highlights and shadows. They also generally blend in really well all colors and work great for mixing. Depending on your makeup design, however, you could use other colors as long as they are darker or lighter than your base color. I’ve used purple as my shadow color before.  Often I’ll use black for shadows and then purple for stippling.

2.       Makeup applicators: For zombie makeup I use my fingers a lot. But makeup sponges are important for blending. Sometimes I’ll also use paintbrushes, but that was more for CATS when there was lots of detail. Another good tool for zombie makeup is a stipple sponge. It creates really great textures.

3.       Translucent Powder: For setting the makeup along with a spray bottle of water. Often I’ll use the set-spray from Mehron or hairspray (basically the same thing) instead of the water.

4.       Baby Oil: To remove the makeup. Makeup remover just isn’t enough; you need baby oil and lots of paper towels.

5.       Astringent: Use it before applying any makeup to close your pores and prevent breakouts.

6.       Dish soap: Best stuff for cleaning brushes and sponges.

7.       Colored Hairspray: What good is Zombie makeup if your hair doesn’t look destroyed too? Plus colored hairspray works really well for body coverage.

8.       Other: For added effect you can always add tooth-black, and a couple drops of red food coloring on your tongue to continue the look in your mouth.

Applying the makeup! Make sure to have paper towels nearby because this can get messy.

·         Start with a clean face and apply astringent to close up your pores. Using your base color you pretty much just cover your whole face. You can use a sponge, a paintbrush or your fingers, whatever. It doesn’t have to look pretty and it really doesn’t need to be perfectly even. Often times I’ll leave the areas with large shadows (eye sockets, cheeks) clear just to save makeup.

Base Color - Cake Grey and Cream Moonlight White

I started using the Cake grey that I had but it was pretty dry so I mixed in some Moonlight White cream to help it out. I think next time I might just use the Moonlight White.

·         Then using the highlight and shadow you want to accentuate the structure of the face. Because of the decaying, zombie faces should look sunken in. So make sure you have shadows in your eye sockets, the sides of your nose, your cheeks. Sometimes I’ll also do the sides of my forehead or I’ll create a hollow above my eyebrows to make them appear to stand out. Use your highlight color to accentuate the things that stick out like your nose, chin, cheekbones, and parts of your forehead.

Shadow before blending.

·         Make sure to blend your shadows and highlights into your base. Using a makeup sponge just dab at the borders until they are blended together and gradient. You don’t want to look like you’re wearing war-paint. It should look like it’s caused by the light hitting your hideous, distorted, sunken face. Fortunately being onstage means the makeup doesn’t have to look perfect up close. It does have to carry across the room though, so the shadows and highlights should be somewhat drastic.

Shadow after blending

Highlights before blending

Highlights after blending.

            

·         I ended up adding more shadow in a couple places because it wasn't dark enough. The black and the grey didn't blend well in certain places so I had to reapply the black.

       You also need to remember to do your ears, neck and any other exposed skin. I usually use the cheap stuff and some colored hairspray for my arms and back (though I have seen some dancers do some really cool stuff with makeup on their hands), but since my neck is so close to my face I like to keep going with the same makeup. The neck should have highlights and shadows as well, and you can also accentuate the collarbone.

·         After I’m done with the base, highlights and shadows I like to add stippling to create texture. Sometimes I’ll set the rest of the makeup first, but not always. I like to stipple near the edges of my face and the edges of the shadows. I also use stippling to make things asymmetrical.

Stippling!

·         Once you’re happy with your makeup you need to set it. All of it. Including any makeup you’ve put on your ears, neck, arms and any other part of the body. Use a powder brush and apply an even layer of the translucent powder over any skin with makeup. You can set different layers at different times, just be aware that once you’ve set a layer you can’t blend it with any other layer.

      Once you’ve powdered you can:

A.      Spray your face generously with water. Take a paper towel, drape it over your face and slowly dab up the excess water.

B.      Spray your face with a setting spray.

C.      Spray your face with hairspray.

This will set your makeup.

·         After setting you should be good to go!! When dancing and sweating a lot sometimes touching up is necessary, but if you’ve set your makeup well it should last a long time.

Removing the Makeup!! You’ll want plenty of paper towels for this too.

·         When all your zombie fun is over, grab that baby oil and apply generously to your face (and anywhere else with makeup). Mush that baby oil all over, then grab some paper towels and wipe off what you can. Usually I do this once or twice then use those disposable makeup-removal wipes to clean up the remainder. I usually finish off by washing my face with a simple face wash – usually in conjunction with a shower to get all the hairspray out of my hair.

·         Use the dish soap to clean up your brushes and sponges.

Good Luck and happy zombieing!!

Zombie Stuff 2011

It's Thriller time again. I didn't make a new costume since my Zombie Dress from last year is still in great shape. I did get to do some zombifying though.

I made a whole bunch of zombie tights for some girls in the cast:

Here's me showing off my sexy zombie legs:

I also helped one of the new guys zombify his suit. It was lots of fun and turned out fabulous. Unfortunately this is the only picture I have of it right now:

Zombie Shoes

One last zombie post for the year - I promise.  This just ended up so cool, that I had to share.

Originally I was going to wear an old pair of character shoes with my Zombie dress for Thriller this year, but I realized about halfway through rehearsing that that probably wasn't gonna work. They were a little to slippery. So I went to the mall to look for some flats that might work and while there were lots of cute shoes, there were none that I could justify buying simply to destroy.

I remembered that I had a pair of generic Ked's from Payless and I decided to make them into zombie saddle shoes.

Using a couple old black fabric pens and a sharpie I turned the white keds into saddle shoes:

Unfortunately I was running out of time and didn't take pictures of the rest of the process.

Once I finished with the fabric pens (I didn't worry too much about getting good coverage because I was gonna destroy them - and my pens were running out of ink) I painted the white parts with some watered down Rit dye (kinda like water colors). I used navy blue, cocoa brown, and gray. Then I used some green spray paint to complete the effect (the spray paint also nicely darkened the black parts even though it was green paint).

I dyed the shoe laces and a pair of socks in some gray dye.  I find that when dying for zombie clothes a quick dye that isn't even (don't stir very much) works the best.  Just remember that it almost always ends up lighter when it dries.

Here's the finished product:

I really do think they made the costume.  They were also super comfy and easy to dance in.

Zombie Dress Part 3

Happy Halloween!!

My stats have sky rocketed this month because of all the people wanting to make Zombie Ballerina costumes. Hopefully next year my zombie dress posts will gain some ground too.

Tonight is our third night performing Michael Jackson's Thriller at the Historic Iao Theater. It's been a blast this year, and I finally have some pictures of my wonderful, complete Zombie dress.

I ended up spray painting it a bit with some green floral spray, and I used a batch of brown synthetic wig dye (sharpie ink fillers and rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle) that I had left over from the Wedding Singer. I thought this added a wonderful effect.

I also did some extra work on my shoes. I'll go into that in the next post.

Zombie Ballerina - Degas

I was going through some pictures on Facebook of last years Thriller and I found some I thought I'd share. As I've mentioned in many of my posts, I was a Zombie Ballerina in previous Thrillers. I didn't mention that I altered the costume slightly last year. I did slightly different makeup and I added some elements (mostly ribbon) to try and make the look evoke a Degas ballerina:

 

 

 

Zombie Dress Part 2

In the last part I made the zombie dress. In this one I destroy the dress.

I started by fading the dress in a bleach solution. It took about 30 minutes to get a slightly aged faded look:

 

The left is the original fabric and the right is the bleached fabric. My next step was to distress the fabric.  I didn't want to make too many holes because it's best to start out small so you don't over do it.

I used pinking shears to mangle the hem. I like pinking shears because they will control the fraying.  Since I'll be dancing and sweating in this dress I'll want to be able to wash it often, and I don't want it to fall apart more each time.

I also made a couple tears in the bottom of the skirt.  I don't want to expose too much skin - because exposed skin has to be covered with makeup - so I tried to limit the holes to the lower part of the skirt.

My favorite distressing tool is my apple corer - I've never actually used it to core an apple - I bought it to make the Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes.  It has a lovely serrated end that I dragged across the fabric to create little holes.

 

Next I tea-stained the dress in a combination of tea, an instant cappuccino pack, and some espresso grounds (I used what I had so I wouldn't have to go out, but I wouldn't recommend the espresso grounds since they never dissolve and you have to deal with them when rinsing afterward. An instant coffee or espresso would've been easier).

 

The tea-stain gives the dress an overall dingy look. One nice thing about making something ugly is that you don't have to worry about even coverage. Normally when dying you need to stir a lot to make sure the color is even. But because it's supposed to be dirty looking you don't have to stir too much because a mottled effect looks more like dirt. Dirt and dinginess happen inconsistantly.

The tea-stain is subtle too. This is after about an hour of boiling (it was actually dirtier looking than in the picture).

My next step was to add dinginess with regular Rit Dye.  I started with Cocoa Brown and dipped about 8" of the bottom of the skirt and the collar in.  The Cocoa Brown works fast, but also looks a lot like dried blood. Since I don't want to look like I died in a bloody massacre I followed up with a similar dip in Navy Blue and then an ink solution.

Note: I washed the dress in the sink with detergent after each step (bleaching, tea-staining, dyeing).

I love the dinginess on the bottom of the skirt. I think I might do a little more to stain the rest of the dress, especially the edges of the collar. I'd like to distress it and darken it some more.

I'm wearing my tutu from my Zombie Ballerina costume under the dress as a petticoat. It works pretty well, but I might see if I can find an actual one instead. I'll probably also dye some pantyhose so I don't have to put make up on my legs.

Once I have the dress finished and get all zombified I will post more pictures.

Zombie Dress Part 1

For my third year of Thriller at the Historic Iao Theater's Annual Haunted Theater Experience I've decided to forgo the Zombie Ballerina costume and make something new. I decided to go period rather than professional this time and I bought this vintage 1955 Simplicity dress pattern:



I had to add about 2" to the pattern because the pattern was too small, and I didn't bother with the pockets because I won't need them. Here's the finished dress:



I may get a petticoat to fluff the skirt out.  The next step will be to destroy and zombify the dress. I'll post another entry about what I end up doing, but right now I'm thinking I'll bleach it a little to fade the color, then distress the fabric (my weapon of choice for this is usually my apple corer), and finally dye it. I'll probably tea-dye it then dirty up the edges with a black or gray dye. I'm thinking I'll also zombify a pair of nylons so that I don't have to put makeup on my legs.

We are also doing another Zombie themed dance that is more tribal/earthy so I'll have to figure out what to do for that.

Stay tuned for more...

Zombie Ballerina

On to something recent.

For the past couple of years Maui OnStage has done a Haunted House at the Iao Theater for Halloween. This year they decided to add a pre-show of Michael Jackson’s Thriller to the mix. Since I enjoy both Maui OnStage and dancing I participated.

The dance is a lot of fun, but the style is a little tricky and can be a pain in the neck – literally. We did Thriller for each group that came through the haunted house. The smallest group had 2 people and the largest had over 20. Over 5 days across two weekends we did the 6-minute dance 97 times. I was one of 3 people who danced it every time (and I want a sticker!).

Since the whole production was a volunteer thing we had to create our own costumes. I decided to be a zombie ballerina. I had an old pair of pointe shoes which I painted with dye to make them look yuckier – it kind of looked like I kicked someone to death as the brown on the toes kind of looked like dried blood. The fact that they were old (a remnant from High School) turned out to be a bad thing in the end because they did not exactly hold up to 97 Thrillers.

The rest of the costume consisted of some old tights, an old tutu, and an old shirt that I dyed and distressed to look decayed and distressed. I had a lot of fun dying, and did so in a way so that the dye job was far from even.

The makeup was kind of tricky because they don’t sell good theatrical makeup on Maui – we all bought the cheap stuff at Wal-Mart. Also, the theater isn’t air conditioned, so it gets extremely hot and the excess amounts of sweat tend to cause the makeup to run. We had some good tips about setting the makeup, which helped a lot, but there was usually some reapplying necessary.