Purple Lipstick, Cyber-Goth Makeup and Goggles

I am terribly sorry for being late in participating in Sophistique Noir's Monthly Theme!

I had forgotten that this month's theme was purple. Well, when I first read it, I was going to showcase my lovely plum and black flocked bedding (as opposed to my black-on-black flocked bedding, or my charcoal and black 'damask' patterned bedding, or my piles of black cushions... I am one of those Goths whose preferred aesthetics are applied to most of what they own.) but then I forgot about it entirely and did not get around to photographing the bedroom. 

Oops.

So, something else purple! Here is some Cyber-Goth style makeup I did last summer. I'm wearing my micro-braid wig, which has a few purple braids down one side, and my goggles have purple lenses (made from an old translucent document wallet that I cut up!). 

As you can see, terrible selfies taken on my onboard webcam, again. This is what happens when I want  pictures of me and Raven is out working! All selfies taken either in the mirror or with funny out-stretched arm movements look even worse, and as Raven is quite possessive of his photographic equipment, and I'm too polite to touch his tripod without asking, I haven't got around to just mounting a camera on a tripod, sticking a cushion where my head will be to focus on, and then running back around to where the cushion was with the camera set to take a picture via the timer. 

Anyway, the micro-braid wig is self made, and the makeup was done to match. The lipstick is a metallic purple that is almost iridescent made by Stargazer. The eyeshadow is actually black and silver, but with a touch of purple under my eyes. I don't have purple eye-liner, sadly, it just looks that way in the photograph.

I like drawing elongated corner on my inner eyes, but rarely do I get them as neatly done as here. I almost always get them wrong, however much I practise. I did decorative shapes around one eye in eye-liner, and as per usual I didn't do both. This is because a) it's really hard to get the symmetry exact, and b) I think that it becomes too much and looks cluttered if I do both sides. 

I am actually wearing a 'spaghetti straps' tank top! With my braids obscuring the straps, it looks like I'm not wearing a top, but I am. You can just about see a purple goggle-lense in this last picture, and it shows the dots and lines and suchlike around my right eyes. I'm so used to doing foliate designs and swirls; the angular design and dots were a bit different. I also like how this picture shows how the silver eye-shadow goes right up to my nose, but the eyeliner from the inner corner is brought upwards with a bit of black eye-shadow to the crease, to give a more distinct eyelid, and to make my nose look narrower.

I think this post also shows a little of how varied my style can be. One day I can be all black curls and lace and frills, and another day I am all spikes and goggles and purple lipstick! I wear things because I think they look nice, and I refuse to get pigeonholed into one specific style. 

Project: Step-By-Step Halloween Cards 1

This one of the styles of Halloween cards I will be making this year. I don't see many Halloween (and certainly no Samhain) cards for sale in the high-street card shops in the UK. I know it is possible to buy some very lovely cards online, and have custom cards printed, but I quite enjoy paper-crafts of various sorts, so I will be making my own.

Components for card making:
Card blank, sprayed card blank, black paper, "lightning bolts",
marbled paper, drawing of a Devil-skull.

To save a bit of time, I have bought some plain black card blanks and matching envelopes (from The Works for £1.49). I would have had to have bought sheets of black card and black paper anyway and this actually worked out cheaper than buying the card and paper! The first thing I did was mist the cards and envelopes with Magical Shimmer Mist, which is a suspension of shimmery metallic particles in an adhesive spray. It comes in a variety of colours, but for this project I have used silver. You can get similar effects with water-based silver paint and splattering, but it is more time-consuming to achieve. 

Shimmery shimmery shimmery...

As the card blanks were drying, I set about drawing the pictures for the front of the cards. Each person will be receiving a different image on their card. For the purposes of this blog, I have photographed the making of a particular card  with a Devil-skull as the image. I drew it in cheap black biro on ordinary utility white paper - no fancy materials. 

Close-up of fanged skull

I cut the drawing out, then traced around the drawing onto marbled paper (HobbyCraft, less than 50p per sheet) and drew a slightly larger rectangle around that, and cut out the piece of marbled paper. I then took a sheet of black paper and drew around the marbled paper onto it with a white pencil, and then drew a larger rectangle around that. I put the drawing, rectangle of marbled paper, and the rectangle of black paper aside (into my crafting tray). 

Lightning bolts

The next step was to cut out the jagged lightning-bolts. I cut these out of more white utility paper, laying them out on the now-dry card blank to see what size they needed to be, using the two paper rectangles as a guide, and how many I wanted, and also to get a better idea on design. They are quite finicky to cut out, and easy to tear, so once each was cut out, it went straight into the crafting tray for safe keeping.

Layered papers

The last step was gluing it all together in order. I started with gluing on the black rectangle, then arranging all the lightning bolts, then the marbled paper, and finally the drawing.

Finished card

I decorated the envelope in the same way, with the same layers, papers and materials, and with a similar design (with lightning) except with an address label instead of a drawing, but because it is an address label, I am not posting a picture of it up on the internet.