[This page is part of a mirror of my Canvas learning system pages I created for my Drama 112 Intro Stage Makeup class at DVC. If you want to use this content for another Canvas class shell you can find it in Canvas Commons by searching for “Tara Maginnis” and you can download all or part of this directly into your shell with all the extra cool formatting of colored divider lines, right side embedded Giphy animations, etc. already put in, if you are working with a different system, it is ok to copy and paste from here, and then customize the pages as you need for your classes].
This week we finally get to the really fun part! You have dutifully done all your prep work, learning about your face, getting comfortable with the items in your makeup kits, and stumbling through the steps you need to do basic makeup. Now, we get to play!
You now know where your face movement/wrinkle lines happen, and now you get to manipulate and move them to make different sorts of characters. Just because your face moves a certain way does not limit you to only one sort of character. In these two fast time-lapse videos I show two characters from The School For Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who are both upper class middle aged women of 1770s England, the first is Mrs. Candour, a gossipy woman who delights in being in the know about scandals, because knowing and spreading the latest gossip gets her in with richer and more fashionable people, and they find her interesting, when really she is quite vacuous, and none too bright. She wears too much makeup to try to look fashionable, but is pretty empty headed and mostly harmless:
Her friend, Lady Sneerwell is also an older upper crust lady, and the villainess of the comedy. She is not harmless. Rich, once beautiful, and now an aging cougar, she wields gossip like a weapon to get what she wants. She wants two things: One she enjoys destroying reputations by scandal (as hers was in her youth) as a general revenge on the world. Two, her main goal is to to break the true romance of the impoverished hero and rich heroine to financially force the young hero into marrying her. She wears too much makeup as well, but it can’t hide her perpetual sneer at the world:
You will notice that between these two styles of makeup the former seems rounded, happy, curious and clueless, the latter sharp, angry and disdainful. This is primarily done by stretching one’s face into the most extreme expressions of a character and then emphasizing the facial lines that form when you make those expressions. This is why I want you to practice making extreme and funny faces in the mirror!
Today you will watch the following Happy Old Age video to learn how to make happy cheery expressions and then emphasize them with makeup. This will 90% apply regardless of color or gender.
And remember how to avoid “liney-ness”:
If you like, here are more optional happy old character videos I have dug up for seeing how other folks get to those sorts of characters:
Click to see young Asian female do old age stage makeup on facebookLinks to an external site.
Despite the splash photo below, this makeup looks kind of like the hot grandpa who gets all the old ladies on the cruise ship when you see him with a normal expression in the video.
