Creating Quentin

These images are taken from my second attempt at creating my Quentin character to which I had made a number of changes including to the makeup, the hair styling, facial hair and costume. Reflecting upon my first attempt at creating my Quentin character there were a number of elements that I felt were lacking from the imagery such as a more gothic undertone of evil, the 1950's styling and more importantly a costume of some description. Overall I felt that my images were bare looking and did not in force the same amount of story realism as my Mrs Laderman, the overall concept of my Quentin was not believable. This was something that I really needed to work on as I felt it had not expressed my work to the best of my ability, that being said I think the initial creation of my character provided me with a good base on which I could build and develop my concept.
The first changes that I made was to that of the makeup from which I had analysed where I had gone wrong on my first attempt and what I needed to do to make the look more disturbing to the audience, as would be fitting with the horror genre and in particular my chosen show of American Horror Story. The colours that I had used previously had been very bright and therefore didn't quite create the dirty look that I wanted to create for my character, instead it looked a little to well polished and artsy as opposed to disturbing. As a result I took the original colours that I had used and mixed in a small amount of black so that they became more grungy and desaturated. I feel this was effective as it completely transformed the makeup. Another change that I made in regards to the makeup was to take the colours down the neck and arms so that the whole body matched what was happening on the face, this means that my Quentin was more tied together as opposed to just focusing on the face.
Secondly I also made changes to the hair styling making sure that it was more slicked backwards against the head in a 'greaser' style, this added a charismatic element to my Quentin as I wanted the concept of being able to fall in love with the monster a key element to his look. By tidying up his hair and styling his facial hair he appears a little more manly therefore appealing to a female demographic. For the moustache I complemented the drawn on smile by curling the edges of the facial hair upwards into a smile like curl, I did this by using a lot of hair wax and holding it in place while it set. To enhance the look of the hair I then added dashes of blue and black to the ends of the moustache as accent colours to complement the eyes.
Within my final photographs I also added a costume so that the makeup would be more of a focus and no large areas of unpainted skin would be exposed. For this I used a tea stained shirt that I had previously coloured and cut the sleeves off of, on top of this I also added a pair of braces to link the overall look back to the 1950's 'greaser boy' styling that was a key element to Quentin's design. Overall I was really pleased with how my final photographs turned out and I think that both the disturbing clown elements work nicely alongside the masculine 'greaser boy' pose and styling to create an overall believable character. In addition I feel that this is some of the best makeup that I have done this year and was really pleased with what I achieved and how my look had developed from my first attempt.