Dark carnival make-up images

Once again I was using the male shoot that I did first as an inspiration. I have also pulled from paganism and obviously carnivals. I used the same ideas as I used when shooting the model with white paint however, by using black paint I was trying to draw upon the dark side. Black is the darkest colour possible which is why I chose it. It is literally the complete opposite of white meaning a complete absence of light.  What black hides white uncovers. The colour black represents the hidden, the unknown and therefore can be thought of as a mystery. Black can hide who you are much like a carnival can, you are free. When you are in a carnival you can literally be whoever you want to be, that means you can choose. In a way you can choose light or dark. This is the representation of the white and black paint on the models. I wanted to show the two sides without being completely obvious.

I am really happy with my final images and feel that they flow together more with the rest of my work now. I think my strongest image from the shoot is the close up of the eye mainly because it is so close it feels asif the model is popping out of the picture to come into reality.

Black carnival make-up contact sheet

This gallery contains 2 photos.

I have included notes about my thoughts and ideas during the shoot on the images.

Carnival make-up, contact sheet

This gallery contains 2 photos.

I have included all my thought and processes throughout the shoot in the images.

Progress

After shooting a collection of different things all based around the subject of carnival I realised that I wasn’t entirely sure how it would all fit together. Due to this I felt the only way to figure out where I was going would be to print out small versions of my work and live with it a little. The image you see below is all my recent work collected together into one space. After looking at each of the images and spending time figuring out how everything would fit together I removed the images I did not feel fit together and kept the ones that you see below. I knew from looking at this selection that I needed some more images of the models to add more variations. I want to make the images fit better together and flow successfully. One of the points I feel work successfully is continuing with the use of the birds of paradise colour theme and linking with the use of glitter. I also feel very strongly towards the male model shoot, the make-up works the best and I feel that the way the model is so close to the camera draws the viewer into his world. It makes them become part of the carnival world. I want to continue with this style of make-up and make the female models more this style. I plan to reshoot with similar make-up drawing on the use of lines and the ideas of paganism. 

Male Carnival inspired images

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After editing down the images I realised that the strongest from the set were the close up ones with the detail in the face, I edited several different angles of the face to give myself variety in my photos. I feel my strongest work is the close up of the whole face cropped in as it involves the viewer in the shot. I also like the use of the colourful bubbles as I think that it adds that little bit extra to the image and brings the viewer into the carnival theme more. I do however, love the black and white shot of my model with his hands to his mouth. It shows the whole feel of the carnival look and the use of the models hands in front of his mouth adds some action into the image. From here I am going to continue shooting beauty images using different looks but I also want to shoot a few full length outfits to show the whole effect of the carnivals.

i-D interviews 2

Kiss and Make-up

Mathilda Tolvanen

Mathilda Tolvanen

Jamie Baah-Mensah

Harris Seoudy

Maggie Maurer

With her totally tropical name and her uncanny resemblance to Lola – the animated Angelina Jolie-voiced fish from Shark Tale – Isamaya Ffrench was always supposed to be a star. She’s appeared in Nathaniel Mellors’ unsettling art film Ourhouse and worked as a Living Polo TV presenter, she dances with the bombastic Theo Adams Company and, aside from all that, she’s transforming make-up into a psychedelic art form. It all started in the city’s primary schools. “When I moved to London,” says Isamaya, “I was face painting just as a means to make money, working at children’s parties and that kind of thing. I’m very lucky, my niece and nephew live close by, so I started doing their school fetes and eventually word-of-mouth got around. I remember all these crazy places that I was cycling to, that I didn’t know about. I worked out London from face painting jobs!” From the smallest parties in happy family flats to super sweet kids’ extravaganzas with Shetland ponies walking around the house, and from covering S.C.U.M in cracked clay to transforming a naked Playboy Bunny into a Halloween pirate, Isamaya’s painted everywhere. “I’ve always been interested in make-up and faces,” she says. “It was a natural thing that came from this obsession with people and characters.” For our shoot on the streets of Hackney, Isamaya magics up pastoral autumnal landscapes on our models’ faces.

Photography William Seldon
Make-up Isamaya Ffrench

http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/look/gallery/811/kiss-and-make-up

i-D interviews

paintjob by isamaya ffrench, i-d’s new beauty editor

Isamaya Ffrench is one of the brightest talents of her generation. The Cambridge born, London based make-up artist has been wowing i-D for the past three years, transforming models’ faces into kaleidoscopic dreamworlds, and mixing her interests in art and mycology to stunning effect. Here she reinterprets spring/summer 14’s hottest trends in subtle and fresh cosmetics on Codie Young.

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Isamaya Ffrench is more than just a make-up artist, she’s one of a new breed of hugely talented young creatives coming out of London right now. Originally from Cambridge, Isamaya has danced for the Theo Adams Company and designed window displays for Galeries Lafayette and Liberty. Now she’s dreaming up game shows, painting masks and writing fantastical films, all at the age of 24! Meet the girl with the beauty world at her finger tips.

Hi Isamaya, how did you start your career?

I studied Art at Chelsea and Product Design at Saint Martins, and I face-painted on the side to make a bit of cash. John Colver [stylist] caught wind of what I was doing, and he told Christopher Shannon about it, who invited me to do the make-up at his spring/summer 11 menswear show. This was my first instance of face-painting in a fashion environment and I found it really fun. It encouraged me to pursue make-up professionally. Around that time I also worked with Matthew Stone for i-D [The Hedonist Issue, No. 313, Summer 2011]. We shot a story with Alek Wek, so we decided to turn all the guys into clay sculptures. Athough I was using heavy materials like clay and paint at the time, the shoot started my progression from art into make-up.

That Christopher Shannon show make-up is already so iconic…
Chris’ clothes are pretty sporty, so outdoor landscapes came to mind. It was quite an outside-the-box idea, but we decided it would be cool to paint landscapes onto all the male model’s faces. We looked at images of night skies, tropical scenes, waterfalls… I love working with nature and organic things, it’s what I love the most.

“I love things that are a bit off, a bit rough around the edges. I don’t like retouching. Mistakes make things human. We live in this weird age where everything is virtually manipulated to make it perfect, I’m happy to challenge that.”

Someone told me you like cutting down trees for fun?
Noooo! I like coppicing, which is really important for the regeneration of woodlands. Basically, we’ve evolved with the forests into a symbiotic relationship, coexisting together. Woods are really dense, therefore to introduce life and invigorate the natural environment you have to clear areas. You’ve got to chop out big areas of woodland so that the sunlight can reach the floor, and butterflies can fly through and pollinate, otherwise it would just rot and die. Over hundreds of years this has come to be the way we work as humans with the environment. Also, if you cut specific trees down they actually branch out and regrow with two trunks; it’s all for their benefit, I’m not into cutting down trees in the name of lols!

Where do you go coppicing?
In Kent. I don’t do it regularly, but it’s a pretty nice thing to do. Again, it’s that idea of reconnecting and understanding where your influences and colours really come from. It’s so inspiring: green and blue, yellow and red. It’s best to copy what works naturally. My sister’s built a yurt in the middle of this wood and we stay there. Maybe you should come?

Yes, I’d love to. When I was younger I used to go out into the countryside a lot, on my own, looking for mushrooms. I’d take trains out into the middle of nowhere.
Did I show you my fungi blog?! I think if I wasn’t doing make-up I’d probably be a mycologist, which is studying fungi. Fungi are going to save the world. Fungi are the major decomposers of the world, of this mass build-up of carbon and all this shit and decay, they’re the in-between state of life and death. At Fukushima, scientists were trying to uncover a way of dealing with the nuclear waste that had spread out into the ground, and they found a specific fungus that metabolises or breaks down radioactive elements. So the fungi are like networks of tiny threads beneath the soil, and the mushrooms are like their fruit – like your genitals, basically – and what happens is these spores suck up all of this radioactive waste and you’re left with a very radioactive mushroom, and the soil around has been neutralised, which is amazing! Maybe you cut the mushroom up and you burn it, but the point is that you preserve the soil, and that’s the beginning stages of life. I think fungi are particular organisms that we can learn a lot from. They’re constantly working out how to thrive in catastrophic scenarios, and we are the most catastrophic thing on this planet.

“Imperfections evoke an emotional response. That’s what I’m after. That’s what art is all about.”

Cool. What was the idea behind you i-D story?
It’s a collaboration between Harley Weir, Julia Sarr-Jamois and myself. Harley’s got a strong aesthetic. I like that she shoots real people, all her portraits are very believable. So I wanted it to look a bit off, a bit rough around the edges. I like things not too retouched, I like mistakes because it makes it look more human. We live in this weird age where everything we create is virtually manipulated to become aesthetically perfect, and I’m happy to challenge that. Mistakes and imperfections evoke an emotional response, whether it’s good or bad, that’s what I’m after, that’s what art should be about! I was having a conversation with Josh [Isamaya’s assistant] the other day about how people will look back upon this age, and he said something very interesting. He said, “We’re living in the last springs of life. We don’t have anything to worry about, it’s the last years of carefreeness, of this dream-like state that we’re all in. These are the years we all indulge. We can’t buy houses, our jobs are up in the air, everyone’s just floating in this soup, then it’s all going to go poof! And we’re going to have to learn how to clean up our messes”

http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/read/interviews/2393/isamaya-ffrench

Text Dean Kissick
Photography Harley Weir
Styling Julia Sarr-Jamois

2nd Beauty shoot

These are some of the images from the 2nd beauty shoot that I tried. For this shoot I had a makeup artist come in, Bethany Cooper. I told her what my theme was and showed her the image I drew with some of the ideas I had in my head. I continued with using the colour theme of the birds of paradise flower and also included some blue to represent the sky over the flower. I loved everything about this shoot and feel that the makeup worked perfectly to represent my carnival theme and the subtle hints of the flower was all that was needed to link my images together at the end. I have started to play around with potentially overlaying things in the orange image just to see where I can push my ideas. To continue with this I am moving on to shooting full costumes mixed with some body paint.

Carnival make-up, contact sheet

This gallery contains 5 photos.

I have included my thoughts and processes from the shoot in the images.

Beauty contact sheet

This gallery contains 2 photos.

This is my contact sheet to my first beauty shoot. I have annotated on the contact sheet my thoughts about the shoot and some of the shots.