What I did last night….Edo Harajuku!

Ansell has wanted to paint a portrait of me for a while. He uses paint to relieve stress, like my sewing. Originally we were going to do some kind of military dress in pin-up style. However, he was really inspired by the National Portrait Gallery we went to last weekend and a special feature they had on modern Japanese paintings, similar to the woodblock style. So, that’s what we went with.

Since neither of us have the time to do a real sitting we did a photo shoot.

First, the outfit and make-up!

 

The outfit is a little crazy but we were just trying to get the kimono feel rather than color. That being said it got very harajuku!

Arika was sorely needed for the make-up. Ansell wanted the geisha look but with my natural skin color. I have a serious lack of pink eye shadow so I ended up just using lip makeup. It came out pretty cool but I was never so conscious of Arika’s vast make-up repertoire and my lack of one.

I tried to do geisha hair as well.

At first we tried to do some body shots but the closer ones where I was allowed to do what I wanted turned out the best.

Ansell wanted a knife as the main prop so it quickly went into evil Harajuku territory.

We also got some shots of me ruining my makeup and taking my hair down. I love these two pics and the first one almost became the painting picture.

Ansell won’t let me post the chosen picture but it was one of the more dynamic pictures and ultimately a good choice.

It was a fun night but I still have a lot of eyeliner hanging on! I look forward to the painting.