Old Age Makeup

I have once again decided to work on my ability to make an allusion using makeup. In the past I have mostly worked on making a wound out of makeup, however, due to an assignment in my Technical Theater class where we are required to make ourselves look old I decided to dabble in the art of aging myself with the aid of makeup. In the class we are to make our faces look old, but sense I knew that we were going to be doing that in class I decided that I wanted to do something a bit different so I decided to age my left hand.

          

  Again I will be using A Complete Guide to Special Effects Makeup by Japanese Makeup Artists as a guide to creating the desired look. To begin the old hand look I laid down thick strips of wax on my finger tendons in order to make them stand out more, the same way that they would on an older person’s hand. That wax was followed by strips of wax dyed blue to give the effect of veins popping out of the skin. In A Complete Guide to Special Effects Makeup it was suggested that one actually finds an old hand of someone that they know so that you can decide what details you wish to add to your hand. While I was unable to actually look at a live persons hand I was lucky enough to find a picture of my great grandmother’s hand where I saw that it was common for an older persons hands to have larger bone joints and choice to add that to my own hand. I accomplished this by building up my knuckles all the way around with wax. “Old skin has a thin look to it that is best captured by a thin layer of liquid latex (42 Japanese Makeup).” After a thin layer of latex I finished the look up with some shadows, highlights, and a few age spots.

  

What do you think? Do I did my great grandmother’s hand justice? 

Works Cited 

Japanese Makeup Artists. A Complete Guide to Special Effects Makeup. London: Titan, 2012. Print.