The New Elizabethans: Summer Project

At the beginning of the course we were set a project entitled 'If I could I would'. This project was designed to inspire us as future makeup artists to explore our ambitions and develop our ideas of who we would like to become in five years time. For this, we were asked to produce a mood board that would represent the first stepping stone in embodying the type of artist we would like to become throughout our time at Solent and encouraged our abilities to translate abstract ideas into practical application. As an art student I view makeup as another media for the purpose of expression and creation, much like sketching, sculpting and painting. Because of this I am frequently inspired by designers such as Dame Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen who have incorporated the 'avant grade' culture, literature and history into a wide variety of the catwalk shows. Beauty, I feel, is how one chooses to express themselves by pushing the boundaries of normality and convention. Makeup merely supplies us with the media to create our own art.

My mood board featuring images torn from the pages of 'Love' and 'Vogue'

My favourite image within my mood board is definitely the kiss shared between Dame Vivienne Westwood and her husband Andreas Kronthaler. For me this photograph captures the passion, feminine beauty and punk boldness that is injected within all of Westwood's work, it embodies the power of women and the ability we possess to create our own world.
One magazine that was of particular use to me when completing my mood board for this project is 'Love', a bi-annual British magazine founded in 2009 fashion journalist Katie Grand. To a makeup novice such as myself this magazine represents the holy grail of inspiration and opened my eyes to the different styles of fashion photography, makeup and hair styling that are available within this diverse industry. What attracted me to the magazine in particular was that as you flicked through the pages you were not presented with pages of bland celebrity endorsed campaigns, but rather numerous small collections of up and coming designers, makeup artists and photographers exploring the taboo and unconventional, with support from iconic designers such as Dame Vivienne Westwood.

In addition to creating our own mood boards we also had to discuss in groups what our boards meant and how they represented us and where we wanted to be within five years time. This exercise was very interesting because it drew attention to just how diverse we are as individuals but also how we each have a completely unique goal for the outcome of our degree. To accompany our mood boards we also discussed in groups how we each interpreted the beauty styling of two films that we selected. It was interesting to discover that the majority chose 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' (1961) but paid more attention to the fashion styling, having almost completely neglecting whether the film explored any groundbreaking iconography within its makeup. However this will most likely become a skill that will be developed as we begin our studies of makeup and are able to focus our eyes to analysing the cosmetics of a production rather than purely the costume.