Pumpkin Queen

Day#3 of 31 Days of Halloween: Pumpkin/Lack-O-Lantern

This look looks like a lot of effort…but it actually only requires a couple products. The trick is, you have the power to make it as detailed and realistic or as simple as you want! As long as you get the basic shapes of a Jack-O-Lantern sort of face and the right colors, you’ll still be distinguishable as a pumpkin babe!

First and foremost, I popped in my Desio contacts in the color Innocent White, which are prescription and awesome for more than just crazy Halloween looks. Trust me, you want to put in your contacts first. Otherwise, you’ll make a hot mess of the black paint around your eyes later.

Speaking of paint, I used Kryolan Aquacolor paints for this whole look. You’ll need black, yellow, white, and orange. These are water activated paints and dry down to a matte finish, leaving a great surface for highlighting with creme products or shading with eyeshadow. I first made a rough outline of the actual pumpkin portion with orange paint. Basically, leave your bare skin as negative space where you want to place your Jack-O-Lanters facial features, keeping in mind you’ll fill it in with black later. Don’t fret over the edges being perfectly clean. Have you ever carved a perfectly proportional and smoothly cut Jack-O-Lantern? Yeah, me neither…so don’t worry about that. I went with a hollow nose that actually resembles a skull for a more creepy look. If you want it to be more sweet, stick with a triangle shape for the eyes and nose. I made the teeth pretty large, in charge, and as jagged as I felt like. I then filled in that negative space with black to cover the remainder of the skin still showing on my face.

When it comes to your brows, depending on how close they are to your eyelids, you may just want to cover them up with the black paint like I did, or you could cover them in orange. If you want to get all fancy with it, you could block out your eyebrows with a washable glue stick and set it with translucent powder before setting down the initial orange paint. I decided to paint right over them in black with an exaggerated, thicker tail end. In the fronts of the brow with a smaller detail brush, I curved the line of each brow inward, then upward to give a sinister expression. If you want to keep your look sweet, skip this part.

We’ll get to the neck later.

After getting these basic shapes down I added some dimension to the pumpkin with the different colored paints.I applied a mixture of the white and the yellow color to the high points of may face such as my cheek bones, chin, center of my forehead, and above my brow bones. I lightly set those areas with some yellow eyeshadow from Saucebox Cosmetics. They no longer formulate this shade, so use any matte and pigmented yellow eyeshadow and some bone colored shadow in the very center of these areas. Also, create shading around the perimeter of your face and fade a dark tones eyeshadow into your hairline, even if your hair is light. I went over the rest of the orange areas and made them even more orange with La Femme Blush in the shade Orange.

Use details brushes to add in small vertical lines going down your face on top of the pumpkin parts only (not the black holes) in white, yellow, and darker orange (which looks sort of brown). You can make any tone variety of orange and yellow by mixing in black or white to lighten or darken it. Add in as many lines as you can and try to make your lines thicker in the center of the face, tapering off at each end of your vertical lines. This will help give the illusion of a more rounded pumpkin shape. Think about the roundest part of a pumpkin. It will be widest and have a highlight in the center and darkness in the vertical ridges. That’s what we’re going for here, but in a more abstract and stringy way.

For the neck, all I needed to do was paint the visible areas orange, shade the contours of my neck with a small amount of black eyeshadow. I continued the same vertical stripes down the neck, but adding in black streaks to create more darkness and emphasize the shadow cast by the face itself. Final details included me literally filling in my actual wrinkles on the bridge of my nose and on my forehead with a mixture of the black and orange paint (which came out sort of brown on the forehead and black on the nose).

I used my natural hair, which is black, because I liked how it faded into my photo backdrop for the purpose of these pictures, but you can use any wig you like or your own natural color. If you do, remember to make sure the outside edges of your face, particularly around your hairline, blend into whatever color your hair is. I used the Saucebox Etude Palette’s black eyeshadow to do this and to add and extra dimensions to the paint job. This detail will help sell it and will likely be one of your last steps.

Now you’re a Jack-O-Lantern! Carry around a candle and you’re set… Just kidding, don’t. That would be dangerous! P.s. this will all wash off with water and a wash cloth.

Well that was fun. See you tomorrow for more #31daysofhalloween.