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| Why start this off with the finished product? Wig cap "selfie" way more fun! |
Dejathoris and I had a full set of Disney Villains lined up for a party on Oct 26th, but then everything fell apart. THEN, the party we were planning on going to was canceled and the replacement party was just out of additional villains budgets. So we went just the two of us to this amazing party thrown by the Calgary Opera and Green Fools Theater company: Grave Gala 2013... It was awesome!
We also were smart enough to hire
Victoria Hall who has done our
Fiona and
Wonder Woman photos to do another round of cosplay photography.
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| The first time we met Victoria only one of us was in body paint.... |
This ended up being our first major exercise in full body paint for both of us. Dejathoris has had an Ursula costume for a few years now and hasn't had the opportunity to photograph it (if you don't know this by now, we suck at remembering to photograph our completed work). She then thought it would be funny if the person who has the home for rescue animals (aka "The Zoo") would be Cruella DeVille (me).
A few months ago I purchased a
Belletto Studio airbrush system for the full intention of doing more airbrushing makeup and honing my techniques. In order to get used to it I started using it for every day makeup. FYI: NOTHING compares to airbrushing your makeup on. You look freaking fabulous.
Dejathoris had also purchased an industrial sized air compressor and we found an airbrush unit at Princess Auto for cheap that worked. The only problem was the units vial for paint was non-gravitational. Meaning that the vial was below the unit, not above like the Belletto. That's my technical term for it. Deal with it.
We watched a ton of YouTube videos on how to do Ursula makeup but my favorite was
this timelaps version which helped us pick out the teals and blues for the eyeshadows.
And although we were going the more "glam" styled Cruella,
this was by far my favorite Cruella tutorial. She's just fabulous.
Cruella was a black Fun Fur coat we'd been gifted by Momma Dejathoris and we added some white cuffs, trim, and collar, and added in the "glam" wig. The dress was something I had left over but did not realize how SHORT it was.. My bad. I'd made the earrings and ring from a sting of faux-turquoise flat rounds I'd found at Micheal's. I glued the earrings to pin posts because they didn't have studs available, only earring drops. The ring piece was inserted into a cheap setting found there as well. I then decided to do a coating of Ben Nye MagiColor Grey ML-25. It goes on reeaaallly light but dries to a nice even grey, but fades pretty quick too. I tried doing contouring with powders afterwords but then ended up brushing off the body paint. So word to the wise, either do airbrushing or do regular makeups. Don't do both. And if you know how to do both, please email me! We sprayed my arms, legs, chest, back, everything! We used up the entire 1 oz vial that I was hoping to use later on in the week but no dice. I'd painted my nails red with the ring finger done in Dalmatian spots for added effect. Although in the pics you'll see that I'm wearing one red glove for effect too. I added red strappy shoes I had on hand (what shoes DON'T I have on hand?).
Ursula, as I mentioned already had the dress, so we're going to focus on her makeup. We bought countless vials of Ben Nye MagiColor Purple ML-15 for the base and Royal Violet ML-35 for contouring. We decided to go the more cartoon focused and were really happy with how the purple worked on Dejathoris in our test runs. Side note: Ben Nye... Why does your "airbrushing" makeup come with a brush and not a dropper??? And if this isn't airbrushing makeup, then we need to know.
So we started with the big Air Compressor in our tests but it just kept getting clogged and the Belletto is smaller so we thought instead of hauling both, we'd just use the Belletto. Well, we started with the Belletto and if we had just stayed there, we would have been there all night and never made it to the party. It went on SO LIGHT. I took one of my makeup brushes and just started PAINTING Dejathoris to save some time. That worked pretty well. We then used the airbrusher to smooth over her, which worked out perfectly. We ended up being so happy with the effect that we nixed the contouring.
We then stuck with blues and teals for the eyeshadow. All came from the e.l.f mega palette that can usually be found at Superstore for about $11 during Christmas or
Hautelook (or from their
website, which I've never used for some reason). The final touch here is definitely the wig. It's actually a Don King wig, styled and sprayed white at the front roots for extra depth. There's a bunch of other wigs you can use but this one is the one we're happiest with.
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| I saw this bus stop and thought this would make a hilarious shot, I was right... |
If I could do it again though? I would apply this sealant between every coating, which Dejathoris wouldn't let me do. I think the more finishing spray would have made it hold on much longer. And to prove it I'm going to make her do a test run of it while we're working on next year's project. She used the gluestick method to do her eyebrows, and if you want more tips on that, there's a great video on it by Kandee Johnson
here.
The party was a blast, we met four other Ursulas one other Cruella. The opera-style Ursula (seen below) won the costume contest last I heard. I wasn't sure as we were getting are cards read. Point of note? Don't tell the tarrot reader that they are incorrect. They don't like that.
Random notes:
- Did you know there's a packaged "sexy Ursula"? WTF
- Don't drink and airbrush, you may break your toys... I'm afraid to email Belletto even though I'm still under warranty
- Don't have a cooler? Ice in the sink works well, especially if you're spending 90% of your time in the bathroom working on makeup. It also contains the mess a little
- Overall we used three 1oz bottles of Purple on Ursula, which is less than what we've read on other sites for recommended body coverage, so as long as you are careful and ration, you should have enough
- Unrelated: don't leave open bottles lying around, you'll dump one eventually
- If you're in Calgary, Don't Hobby Shop has a LOYALTY program that I found out after repeatedly cleaning out their Ben Nye stock for WEEKS
- I'm a little mortified that I used the term Selfie, even in a caption
As always, all our photos can be found on our
Flickr. There will be more Cruella and Ursula ones shortly!
So when I found out I was pregnant I started coming up with the craziest and silliest ideas for cosplays. However, many if not all were individually vetoed by different members of the group of just being too weird. I still think my Melissandre would be delightfully disturbing, but whatever. 
Since I'm not officially obsessed with Gamora am the Guardians of the Galaxy I finally ended up deciding to do a Maternity cosplay shoot I dubbed "Pelvic Sorcery". I know I'm twisted. I still think it's hilarious. Word of note though? Body paint is very uncomfortable pregnant, and I broke the zipper on my boots. Thankfully they were my backup boots. 
