Eustratia Halloween Favourites and SALE!

Every year, I notice it’s coming up to Halloween on about the 10th of October and decide to schedule an appropriate photoshoot and a “top picks” collage from designs for Eustratia.

This year, I decided to be a bit more pro-active and post my selections early. This gives you guys more time to think about your outfit and also coincides with the mini SALE I’ve just put on for the remainder of the week! (but obviously you’d have to make up your mind quick for that, end midnight on Saturday GMT).

I’m not really into items that I see as tacky, or anything that is specific to a particular character, though I do love dressing up. I prefer to choose items that can make an impressive addition to a costume, but are versatile and can also be used in other situations.

eustratia halloween favourites

Here we have a few examples of items I have incorporated into past costumes but continue to come in useful today.

The Elizabethan Ruff

The latexlace mask

The bunny hood, bunny mask fascinator and bunny ear fascinator

The antler headband

The miniruff trim collar

and the kitty ears.

These are just some easy options I picked to save you looking through the whole website, if you have some spare time though, there are plenty more wonders in the sale section. Harnesses of any type are also a great choice in my opinion. They give a distinctive “tough” look that can also be toned down enough to wear every day, with the right outfit.

If you have something extra special planned and nothing on the site will quite do, I’m always happy to take on custom commissions and I will offer 20% off those until Saturday. That includes crowns, horns and hair covered, sculptured head pieces that you may have noticed in some of my work.

To give you some inspiration, here are some of my costumes from previous years that I’ve been photographed in:

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Dark

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Jamie Mahon-5418a

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A few of these are a bit old now, but I hope you enjoy looking at them all the same.

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The origin of monsters

I’ve admired Daniella Jaine’s dreamy photos for some time now and I had a feeling we could produce something amazing if we worked together.

I got in touch and after a few emails, some cheap gay village cocktails and amazing tea and scones we had a basic idea for a concept. As with a lot of shoots, the theme changed slightly as we realised the logistics and characters. We originally talked about a mythology theme which I was going to keep some ties with regarding the characters, but as the sets got bigger I decided the outfits needed to fit in rather than have a separate meaning of their own so I’m keeping the mythology inspiration for an other time. I think it can be hard to separate all the inspiration and features I want to use into shoots and choose which one it would look best in but I’m happy about the decisions I made here.

We were working towards two sets for the shoot with two outfits per set.

Set 1, The tree house.

The feel of the tree house set was jovial, mischievous and playful in natural shades and decorated with interesting trinkets.

Daniella’s inspiration was based on tree houses and “where the wild things are” so I decided to ask my friend Amber (who is also modelling with me in this set) if we could shoot at her family home, where they already had a reasonable sized tree house that we could add to, instead of making something entirely from scratch and then trying to put it in a tree. We were lucky to be able to shoot here, it made things a lot easier for both sets.

I made all the hair pieces myself, as usual. These were made by recycling stuff I had used for previous shoot. If you remember my chicken wire horns tutorial, the black hat I’m wearing in the first set was made out of one of these and a cheap black wig. Then I used the remaining chicken wire and some kanekalon hair to make the wig that Amber wore.

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My boyfriend agreed to make the wall and door to add to the tree house so I bought him some sticks to play with. He normally makes chainmail and jewellery but can also take other commissions, you can view his work here. We ended up with a round window reminiscent of a hobbit hut. This was totally unrelated to the initial tree house inspiration pictures but we thought it would fit in more with the “where the wild things are” influence and also the name Danniella chose for the set, “The origin of monsters”. The door was made out of cardboard that I collected from the move, we were worried about how it would look at first but Rik painted it to achieve the desired effect. In the end I could really imagine beautiful monsters meeting in this tree house for tea.

tree house

2013-04-01 14.45.07  The finished tree house set was then decorated with various beautiful trinkets that Daniella brought and some flowers and fabric that I had from previous shoots.2013-04-01 16.06.31

The large window was very useful to shoot through. 2013-04-01 16.07.30The final images:

mosters 2Daniella jaine mosters 1Daniella jaine monsters 2daniella jaine monsters 4Though latex, I wanted these outfits to be different from the type of stuff I usually make and most importantly, silhouettes not usually associated with latex. I chose to make a handkerchief hem dress with a pleated bust and waist-belt and an a-line strapless dress with a loose fitting, cropped t-shirt. Though quite different I thought they complemented each other and I added continuity in the form of a matching colour block detail. daniella jaine monsters 5I also loved my oversized earrings, I made them as an experiment but I might give an other pair a go now.daniella jaine monsters 3The beautiful, make up in these sets was done by Laura Wilson, if you follow my work you should be familiar with her, she never disappoints!

 

Set 2, the hanging bed.

The hanging bed set is dreamy, romantic and a little creepy.

Initially I didn’t have much to go on for this set. It started with the crazy notion that while my bedroom was being redecorated and I was sleeping at the studio, it would be the perfect opportunity to dismantle my bed and take it somewhere it could be suspended from a tree! Most people laughed when I told them about my idea but it pays to have a dad with a big car willing to drive you places, a boyfriend who knows his knots and a best friend with an awesome garden. It would have been a lot more difficult to achieve this without them.

Even after we had worked out the logistics and bought some very thick rope, I wasn’t quite sure how to tie my floating bed in with the story. I have seen pictures of beds hanging on rope online before but I wanted this to have some sort of meaning. Eventually, a few days before the shoot I was looking though my trims box when inspiration stuck. A lot of artists say they get inspiration from the most random places and this was one of these moments. The initial idea was that I was going to create soft monsters, with soft trims, that would match the bedding, then I came up with the concept of “dream monsters”. When we met up Danniella told me that the tree house had come to her in a dream and this was mine.

The dream monsters were to have lace horns and wear pyjamas and lingerie.

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2013-04-01 14.44.20Rik tying the bed up.

2013-04-01 15.01.52When the bed was finally up we added some lanterns. It was quite a windy day so I had to tie the bedding on to stop it flying off and getting dirty.

2013-04-01 18.34.39In some of the pictures it doesn’t look that high off the ground but it was high enough and we needed a ladder to get up there, the bed was also tilted so it was easier to photograph and we needed to perch on the back of it so as not to slide off. We also had to watch out movements and the bedding had to be pulled back up a couple of times during the shoot because it was slipping down the bed, making it hard for us to balance.

2013-04-01 18.20.37Of course we did some shots on the ground first, in case the bed collapsed as soon as we got on it!

2013-04-01 18.16.40It was a cold day and we wore our dressing gowns for as long as possible in between shots.

32385_481941581872979_150128865_nand we were finally on the bed!

2013-04-01 18.35.59I also love this one with the lace sheet.

The final images:

daniella jaine monsters 6daniella jaine monsters 7daniella jaine monsters 8daniella jaine monsters 9_MG_8188I really enjoyed working on this shoot and hope to be involved in more large projects this year.

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New collab and Illustrated pictures

I was recently asked to jump in on a shoot my bf, Richard Ayres had arranged with Beverly Ann photography.

If you haven’t seen a lot of Beverly’s work around yet, I’m sure you will do in the near future. She is a promising young photographer with a clear vision, who also creates props to enhance her concept. I always admire photographers who like to be involved in more than just taking pictures, they are usually edgier with bigger ideas (which in turn means they might like to work with me on some of my big ideas).

For this shoot she had made these oversised demon hands which looked great combined with some black paint that she also applied herself. I love how the image below turned out and the black eyes were such a nice touch.

I was also given permission to edit some of the images from our shoot. I did one set with light pastel colours which I’m holding back until after its publication next month and an other which I can show you now.

I started off by just doing a beauty retouch and cleaning up a few things.

I did actually consider cropping this last one but decided I liked the large white space.

Models: Myself (Biomechanina) and the beautiful Jess Sevensin who you will most likely see featured here again soon!

After editing the photos as you see them above, I wanted to add something extra. I experimented a few times by making the background darker or adding some clouds but neither of these worked for me. I then remembered that I had wanted to produce a set of images with my own illustrations over the top of them for a while and these would be perfect.I did a bit of online research to find some examples that might inspire me. I have posted some on tumblr.

I have been working on some illustrations for an upcoming t-shirt line recently and most of my illustrations feature faces and insects. There were already faces in these images so I decided to draw insects, mainly moths, butterflies and dragonflies. I also added a couple of other natural and dark themes I felt were relevant.

The outcome:

What I really liked about this is that the drawings didn’t have to be great to look effective. Most of them were just quick doodles but they really transformed the feel of the images. I tried quite a lot of different things as it was my first attempt at something like this but I will definitely be doing more in the future and may produce some more concise sets with a preset theme. In these images the illustrations were drawn separately and applied onto the pictures using photoshop but I would also like to try printing the pictures out and painting on them as well as drawing electronically.

If anyone else tries something similar (or does any sort of work combining photography and illustration) I’d love to see!

Hair piece tutorial

After the interest in my horn hair-piece, I decided to do a tutorial for anyone who was inspired to make their own.

The base is made out of chicken wire. I find it a convenient material to make large hair pieces out, it’s easy and quick to shape and can be covered with virtually anything.

I used wire cutters to cut a triangular shape out of the chicken wire and joined it into a horn shape by sculpting it twisting the ends round. (each horn was formed separately)

Then I joined the two horns together in the middle by twisting the wire.

I thought Kanekalon fibre fake hair would be best for this project. I used about three packets for this in two different shades.

Basically, the idea is to wrap the hair around the chicken wire till the whole thing is covered. I found that backcombing the hair first gives better coverage and helps it stay in place. I used a few hair grips to secure the hair in some places.

After the whole hair piece was covered, I poured hot water over the hair piece so the hair set tightly around the base (only kanekalon hair has this property), this also combated the amount of fluffy hairs sticking out that were previously quite evident .

The unicorn hair-pieces I used in the VAU VAU fashion show were also made in a similar way but there I backcombed and twisted the hair into a tube before attaching it in a spiral. The way no need to pour water over these as the desired effect was already achieved and the twisting meant there weren’t that many stray hairs.

Ezra by Arien Specter at VAU VAU.

If anyone has any questions I will be happy to answer them and if making is not for you I am also happy to make hair pieces to order, please contact me for details.

Bella Morte Alt girls feature

This month I was selected to feature in Bella Morte magazine’s Alt girls issue, available to purchase here. They chose a set of photos I shot a while ago, in Chester with Gareth Hickey. There were a few hundred entries and only 20 girls were featured which makes me feel quite good.

They chose a set of photos I shot a while ago, in Chester with Gareth Hickey and gave me a double page spread, which you can view below.

My favourite image from this set and the one I use for my book is the one below but the feature has definitely make me appreciate the other two a lot more.

image by Gareth Hickey, make up by Azzurra