September 19th, 2011

Sharpie Wounds

This past weekend was a long long weekend thanks to the Mexican Independece Day which was on Friday. We got Thursday off as well so I had a lot of free time for myself.

Top Cat came out on Friday and in the morning right after I showered I decided to make a sharpie tattoo of TC himself as a way to celebrate the premiere. It was going to be quite a challenge since I had to draw it upside down so that everyone else sees it up right (all of my thigh tattoos look upside down when I'm standing because I make them from my own perspective). I was getting really frustrated with it so I quit and decided to try something different instead.

When I was a teenager I remember watching the making of Dawn of the Dead and when they showed the make-up FX my mind was totally blown. Like this...

That could've been an important turning point in my life if I had known that there were schools for that. I realized such thing when I was already studying animation so it was a little too late. I love being an animator but I think I'll always have that thing for make up effects...

This last couple of weeks I was feeling bad for not doing sharpie stuff anymore but I had been thinking a lot about doing some make up FX tests using the markers, face paint and lip gloss. Most of the things I do with sharpie are mere mental experiments long before they become real. So in my mind it all made sense when I started painting wounds on my skin. I was so pleased with the first one that I got extremely excited.

I had painted bruises on myself before with face paint and I knew it was gonna help me a lot to make the wounds look a lot more real. Also when I made my spiderleg tattoo I learned I could make stuff look 3D using only the markers and a bit of white eyeliner. Lip gloss was the new material in the list and it was time to see if it worked as I had in mind.

Of course making small wounds wasn't quite a challenge. I wanted to try something really mindblowing. I have a pretty solid understanding of how different kind of wounds look like. When I was a little girl I used to be fascinated by my mom's medicine books which were a little too graphic, especially those about forensics. I still like that kind of stuff. For a long time I wanted to be a doctor or better yet a criminologist so I grew insensitive to graphic and gruesome pictures and painting them on me turned out to be very exciting. It sounds kinda fucked up but it's just who I am, haha.

So yea... even though I know what wounds look like I still used reference (all artists do). After going through some images in Google I decided to make a big ass wound on my leg. I'm pretty damn happy with the result. That afternoon my dad was supposed to pick me up for that week's driving lesson. I was waiting for him outside and when he saw my wounds he freaked out but then he realized it was just me being insane again so he eyerolled as always. It's fun how he supports my crazyness, he even took me to WalMart despite the fact that I had two gruesome injuries on my legs. People were staring at me... most of them were completely grossed out by it. One girl approached me to make sure those were fake because it looked truly revolting, once I told her it was make up she felt relieved and started telling me how it would be awesome for a Halloween costume and then left.

On Saturday I was still on fire. I really needed to keep practicing what I had just learned. My brother was home and I made a small wound on his arm. It was quite a surprise to see that my wounds were very popular on dA and lots of deviants kept asking for a tutorial. As I was painting my brother I was explaining the process because if he understood how it's made maybe I could make the tutorial that very day. I wasn't sure if I was ready to make a tutorial though so I thought that maybe a livestream was a better option. I prepared my webcam, my mirror and got livestream all set. For some weird reason it didn't want to show my webcam so that was a big problem... At the end I made a time lapse that would keep my sharpie fans busy for a bit.







This is what it looked like outdoors:

I went the whole day with that thing on my face. Once again my dad took me out but this time we went to the theatre to watch Planet of the Apes.

The day after I still had the urge to paint wounds but I got busy doing the laundry and also I was waiting for my mom to pick me up. I was getting a little desperate just sitting around and waiting so I quickly grabbed my sharpies and started painting a wrist cut which turned out pretty decent. My mom supports my crazyness too so she doesn't really care if I'm being totally ridiculous in public. We even went to grab lunch and ice cream.

Today I'm pretty chilled. Painting so many injuries on myself over the weekend was fun as hell. I'm preparing something a lot bigger and grosser. Stay tuned!

Cheers.