Art Club Conducts Prosthetics Demonstrations

 

by Madison Sayre

As Halloween approached, students walked the halls while bearing gashes on their foreheads and cuts on their hands.

Art Club members conducted Halloween makeup demonstrations on students on Tuesday, Oct. 30 in the cafeteria during engagement hour. They also had a raffle for a Halloween gift basket, with tickets at $.25 each.

As a newly founded club, President Brandon VanNoy said that they had this event to showcase the club, and to get the word out about the Art Club existing. According to VanNoy, the students had meetings in the past, but never made it an official club until last week. The club is open to any liberal arts student; meetings are every Thursday from 12:15-1p.m. in the art room.

Art club adviser Dr. Lauri Reidmiller said that they came up with the idea as a group. “When talking to students, I found that they have hidden talents when it comes to makeup application,” she said. “I figured it would be great to have a group that teaches how to apply prosthetics and make it into a fundraising event.”

Four students applied makeup: Ashton Buzzard, Kalina Johnston, Dyvan Locke and Holly Buskirk. “Growing up, zombie movies were my thing, and I just loved to watch them and replicate the makeup,” Buzzard said. “It’s rare for me to do makeup on others, so when I was asked, I said ‘of course I want in it!’”

Buzzard did a cat scratch, stab wound and gash mark on students. He relies mostly on prosthetics, specifically gore looks. “Gore is simple and quick,” he said.

On the other hand, Locke prefers face paints over prosthetics. She said she typically uses any kind of drugstore makeup. When asked her opinion of prosthetics, she said, “I don’t personally like it because it’s on the pricey side. I’ll use it if I make my own, but it’s just really time consuming.”

 

Locke did a Cheshire Cat/ The Joker look with face paints on a student during the makeup demonstration. She enjoyed the event because art club members got to “share our creativity and share what kind of people we are, and have people join in the creativity with us.”

By having a knife wound applied to his hand, freshman William Runyon said that he learned the basics of the prosthetic makeup application. “I’ve never had this done before, and it’s freaking me out how realistic it is,” he said. “I want to clean it up, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you have a wound like this.”

Runyon said he liked watching the process come together, and he likes how the end result looks. He will most likely experiment with prosthetics in the future because “I can see how much skill it takes, it would be very satisfying to be able to create it myself,” he said.

The importance of events such as this is pravelant to art club members. “It shows that 2D art is not the only art out there, there’s also 3D—not just with computers, but also with costuming and cosplay,” Buzzard said.

VanNoy said that it is important to have art-centered events in college because “most colleges focus on sports events, but we are able to incorporate more than just sports in an art event.” Therefore, this will become an annual event, according to Dr. Reidmiller.