The New Wild One

As part of the new direction of species for The Wild One, in a previous post I redesigned the costume, for this blog I shall reveal the new makeup design which shall be seen live in a week’s time.

 

 

As you can see the original design on the left has a lot of earthy tones to reflect the character’s species of origin (Golden Eagle) and personality of the hippy-like, freedom hungry, wild child, yearning to be able to fly freely in the great outdoors. Also, the original design was designed with the character being the most human of all the charters in mind, thus having the most simplistic and natural looking makeup, unlike the explosions of colours of the other birds in the cage.

 

Now as you may remember, the Director wanted to change the species of bird to a Woodpecker, a British Spotted Woodpecker if you want to go into detail, a Male British Spotted Woodpecker for those who wish to be exact as seen below…

 

 

As you can see, this bird has very little markings on it’s face, so I have had to use a little bit of Artistic Licence to make the character look good on stage but also take into consideration the lighting of the stage and the Director’s requirements.

 

The Director wanted the makeup to blend in with the hairline, preferably red, so what I will do, is a blending technique used in the face painting  profession (usually on cat faces) where the darker shade it sponged onto the hairline, then blending it into the lighter colour (usually white) further into the face, in this case it will be bright red blending into the white, then the white blending into the natural skin tone or foundation base. An example of this technique is used quite often in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical CATS . Here is an image of Michael Gruber as the character Munkustrap, note the grey blending into the white, especially on the cheekbones.

 

 

 

For the new Wild One makeup design, I have used this technique in my initial sketch, I have also tried to incorporate the detail of the Woodpecker’s feathers into the blending of the design. What I intend to do is blend a little bit of black with the red in between the eyes and each side of the nose, the paint faint white dots to match the wing feather of the bird and to link into the feathers used of the character’s headband and necklace. Note the bottom to center left of the right image at the top. See Slideshow for larger image.

 

Pallete Code – 1   2   10   48

Blending Code – 7+48   1+7

Here is the final design of The Wild One with the eye shadow pallete and blending codes for future reference.