Practical Task - fake cuts

Fake cuts

Inspiration

My inspiration for this practical task was the in the film; Grave Encounters (2012) a supernatural horror a scene where the girl wakes up having been scratched by a supernatural force on her back with the words 'hello'.

I wanted to keep what I was using to make the cuts to a minimal so that I could find them easily in my home, so I decided to research 'scratch' effect make up tutorials on you tube. I found this video here:

This was a simplified version of what I wanted to do, however what I needed to make the scratches wasn't hard to find and was easy instructions to follow.

My Attempt:

I used:

• PVA glue
• A thin paint brush
• EyeShadow (different shades) - brown, black, purple
• Red ballpoint ben
• Red felt tip pen
• cocktail stick

I started off doing a practice where i followed the tutorial to exact. This was what I got:

However I wanted to change it In order to relate to the common conventions of typical horror films I wanted to add a religious connotation by creating a make-up scratch of the pagan symbol of the pentagram onto my arm.

Steps:
- I started off drawing the shape of the Pentagram in a red ballpoint pen
- Next, I added brown eyeshadow to the outline of the drawn out pen.
- I then added glue to outline of the red pen, using a cocktail stick to put the glue on. 
- I did each line of the pentagram at a time and went over the glue with a red felt tip pen making the blood look shiny 

- This was followed by lightly adding black eyeshadow over the top of the red pen.

- I kept adding eyeshadow and felt tip pen until I felt it looked realistic

- To make it look like the character had been pinned down to have it scratched on with force, I used purple eyeshadow and dotted it around the outer ring of the pentagram giving it a bruised look

Finished look:

Evaluation:

Whilst this was a quick and easy task in order to achieve a look of a scratch on effect, I found my first attempt at the simple scratches that followed the YouTube tutorial to exact looked a lot more realistic. However, due to half way through my second attempt with the pentagram my red pens running out I found it difficult to re-create a blood like look.