The Borgias Season 3 Makeup

Holy cow you guys - I got to work on a really cool project with Showtime's The Borgias.  I got the call and nearly didn't take the job because it was outside of my normal skill set.  As you probably know, I am super comfy making people look pretty but initially the words "corpse" and "bloody" were being batted around and I don't really have a huge call for dead people or blood in my line of work.  The video footage and pics are going to be for the opening credits of the new season as well as print promo material.

After more chatting we figured out that what they actually wanted was super paled out skin that hasn't seen the sun and blue veins were visible.  And they might want some blood in there too.  It was slated to be macro body shots - meaning close ups of particular body parts like a shoulder or a hand.  No faces.  NO faces.  So I thought about it and after explaining all of the things I couldn't do (cuts, scabs, building of special FX situations) they said, "yeah, that's okay - we'd still like to go with you".  So I said "okay, let's do it!" and settled into looking at tons of pictures of the circulatory system.  Oh, and I had a week to get it together.  And it was the week of Christmas.

Not to be gross, but we have a lot of veins - and Day 1 - I drew them all

Day 1 looked nuts so I tried to go more in this "vein" after that

I don't have pictures of it but my husband was, as usual, my guinea pig and got his veins drawn in - after my first attempt his response was "um, yeah, that's a good first try.  It's good you have a few days."  I drew in every vein and was using a blue cream "bruise" color from Ben Nye and it was just too heavy and hard for me to work with.

What I ended up working with was Ben Nye Cream Foundations in Geisha and Death Pallor (I mixed them in equal parts) to pale out the model's skin.  Then I used my Erin's Faces Mineral Eyeshadow in Navy with my little liner brush from the Brush Set and then softened the line with my concealer brush.  Everything got powdered and that was it.  We had to redo it every time though because the photography director would have the models run their hands over their arms, for instance, and slowly the veins would go away so it was a pretty full day of "veining".  It could have been a little uncomfortable if I would have had different models but the girl and guy I worked with were AWESOME as was the production company and all the folks from Showtime - it was very inspiring to see so many people be so creative.

Here are some pics from my IPod:

This is before I "foundation'ed" my male model's tummy, only arms are done here

Chest, tummy and neck got done on male model

Hip veins on male model

My female model - she was making a "dead geisha vampire" face which was inspired by the foundation names :)

Girls, thankfully, are not as veiny as boys but it does make it harder to find and draw them