Sunday, December 4, 2011

Becoming Toralei - Self-Portraits

Yesterday I was able to finally finish my costume. The next step was becoming Toralei myself. I started with putting the wig cap on and trying on the wig. I snipped a few wayward strands of hair and decided it looked just like I wanted it to. I took it off again because it would be the last thing I put on when I was finished.
Next was the facial prosthetic. I had two options, in the cartoon Toralei has a cat nose but on the doll she just had a normal humanoid face. I wanted to challenge myself and as I had never used a facial prosthetic like this it seemed like a good opportunity to do so. I cut it to fit and used spirit gum to adhere it to my face. I then used liquid latex to smooth the edges out so they blended into my face better. This took more than one try because the liquid latex would dry so fast that it would start sticking to my fingers and peeling off as I dabbed it. And if I tried to pull a section that got wrecked like this off, the entire thing would pull away from my face. I eventually just used quantity in order to work with it before it dried. The entire thing was not as smooth as I wanted but at that point there was nothing I could do about it. I started applying a base coat of white Mehron cream paint.
What was looking back at me was quite unsettling. I did actually sneak up on my partner while he was on the computer and when he turned to look at me caused him quite a scare! He said that I "looked real". He referenced Skyrim, a PC game he had been playing, which has a race of cat humanoid characters called Khajiit and we later looked at images from the game such as here: http://cdn.gamerant.com/wp-content/uploads/Khajiit-Faces-Skyrim.jpg

I taped a reference of Toralei's face to my mirror. The next stage was to paint half my face orange as seen in the web version of Toralei's face. I also drew an online for where I wanted my nose to be black. With black liquid makeup I painted my nose inside the lines I had drawn and painted my makeup. Orange eyebrows, pink, grey, and silver eye shadow, black eyeliner and mascara.
This is the last of the self-shot images.

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