mary-masked

Wendigo Make Up Test!

Published: August 16th 2017, 3:38:47 am

For the Hannibal Show I'm not just doing my Hannigram duet, I'll also be doing an act where I start off as the Wendigo. I also thought this would make for a good promo image: Naked, antlers, black body paint. But then my photographer pointed out that the line between blackface and painting my face black might just be *too* thin, especially right now.

I checked with a burlesque social justice group and the consensus was pretty much, "Yeah, don't do that. Also proceed with caution on that Wendigo thing." (The Wendigo cultural appropriation thing is a long, complicated thing but...the short version is that I feel like this is respectfully done, in line with the original myth, but also very much its own thing. Much like the characters in American Gods.)

People also pointed out that black on black is hard to make work on stage and it's very easy to just lose all features and fade into the background.

So it was time to get creative. I wanted my antlers to be sort of showgirl antlers anyway so I felt good about taking some liberties with the overall look.

I started out simple with just black contours.

Creepy contour version.

Sexy contour version.

Compare and contrast photo!

Then I added some color, hoping to get sort of an oil slick effect.

Kinda neat, but not quite what I wanted.

I was originally assuming I'd do a full face paint so I went alllll out.

And it was kinda terrible. I can't see this without thinking of Violet Beauregard. The contouring faded away into the blue and took away a lot of my features. Also, painting my face was difficult, time consuming, and kind of annoying. Definitely not something I'd be keen to do in the middle of a show.

But there were some things I liked about it, so I took off most of the blue, and went back in with the black and green to mix together the elements I liked from each previous look

And voilà! This is a messy version, but I like this look. It's dramatic, a little sexy, a little scary, and keeps the unearthly, hollowed out, idea of the Wendigo. And will make for a much faster change between acts.