BRAINS!!!!

For those of you that don't know, I am the creator of Out and Aboat (The Central Minnesota's Lakes Area's Source for What's Happenin'...that's a mouthful, I know).  To help get the word out about the website and get the community involved Out and Aboat created Alexzombia, Alexandria's first zombie pub crawl.  I had to take some promotional photos for the event which meant I had to dress up like a zombie last week.  I wanted to share with you my makeup tricks.  You can use these techniques this Halloween or join us for Alexzombia!

The first step is shading your face with black face makeup or powder.  I used a combination of both, a black cake makeup (found right now in any store's Halloween section) and then covered it with a black powder eyeshadow to cover it.  Then I used white cake makeup and a matte white eyeshadow to cover my eye lids.  I used a black eyeliner to draw around the white and black eyeshadow to fade out from the white area.

Now comes the fun part...creating wounds.  Unfortunately I didn't forget to take pictures of every step I went through, but I'll explain the best I can.  I used Elmer's glue and toilet paper.  The first step is making your toilet paper 1 ply.  It's easy enough to peal it apart.  Apply a thin layer of Elmers glue to the "wound" area with a cotton swab and place the toilet paper on the glue.  Using your fingers pinch the toilet paper together in certain spots to create a raised look.  Using the cotton swab, apply glue around the edges of the toilet paper to seal them down.  If you feel like the toilet paper isn't sticking very well apply some glue on top of the toilet paper to solidify it.  The more glue you use the more "solid" the wound will be.

The wound will take about 15 minutes (or more depending on how much glue you use) to dry.  Once it drys use a brown cake makeup and cotton swab to color the toilet paper.  It doesn't have to be perfect or completely covered because you will add blood over it.  The brown adds dimension and makes the blood look more coagulated.  Once you have the wound colored, use a cotton swab to add blood.  I just "gooped" it on and kind of let it run where it wanted (make sure you have an old tshirt on).  You can use fake blood or create your own.  I don't have an exact recipe for it, I just guesstimate.  Simply add corn starch to corn syrup until you get your desired consistency (you want it pretty thick when applying it as makeup).  I suggest starting with a 1/4 cup of corn syrup, you can always add more.  I usually end up with more blood than I need.  For the right color use red food coloring and a little bit of blue.  Don't use just red it will be too bright.  Like I said, I messed up and didn't take enough photos for this project, but here's the finished look.

Thanks to my friend Shanna for helping me out....her makeup and costume was AWESOME!!!  As you can see, when you close your eyes, the white eye shadow makes it look like you don't have eyes.  Have fun with it!  We took these pictures at my sisters house which is just down the street.  An elderly couple stopped us on the road and asked for directions...we're not sure that we would have stopped and asked zombies for directions, but it didn't seem to phase them.