October 10th, 2016
Warpaint is thrilled to welcome Tina Earnshaw as our latest contributor. With tips and tales straight from the film sets, she’ll be sharing some of her vast experience with us – and has kindly included a 30% discount code for her make-up brushes, just for Warpaint readers. Read on to hear about Tina’s experience on The Martian and to find out how to redeem your discount.
Tina Earnshaw
I would like to start by saying how excited I am and privileged to having been asked to do a regular column for the fab Warpaint magazine. I’m sitting here, writing my first article, in my sweet office-come-conservatory, looking out to my garden and the river running through with all the wildlife.
I am going to tell you about The Martian, for which I designed the make-up and hair. Ridley Scott was the director and Janty Yates the very talented costume designer, who I have known for many years – we used to work on commercials together and had some amazing, decadent times. The Martian was a challenge for me, only in the sense that Matt had been to George Clooney’s wedding the week before we started shooting and had an incredibly short haircut. I had the amazing Maralyn Sherman on my team doing Mat’’s hair for me, and I had three wigs pre-made for Matt without a fitting as he was not available, but the wig maker had his measurements. So far, so good!
For the story, and the sheer length of time Matt’s character was to be stranded on Mars, Ridley needed us to have two or three hairstyles of different length. We tried the wigs on Matt and they really did not work with the space helmets, so I put my thinking hat on and had two half wigs made up. Alex Rouse made these back pieces, for me and they were brilliant. Then the real issue was what to do with half an inch of hair on the rest of his head!
I had masses of little tiny strings made (really tiny, fine wefts made on invisible nylon), ordered heaps of hair from Woods Hair Supplies in four different colour and ordered a glue gun and machine. Then Charlie, my amazing junior, and Maralyn set to and made masses of tiny extensions. The outcome was amazing and Matt was so patient, he sat as good as gold until we perfected his look – we got there in the end and nobody realised it was not his own hair. The experience of working with Ridley Scott is always a challenge, a very wonderful one as he always gets the very best out of me; he makes me go that extra mile because I would be devastated if I got anything wrong.
Now I want to talk about the amazing Jana Carboni who did Matt’s make-up for me. She is Italian though lives in London now with her beautiful family. As with Matt’s hair, we had to have different stages of beards and stubble. This is such a hard thing to achieve when you might have three changes in one day, and are never given the time you need. I have now learnt – having worked with many Italian make-up artists over the years – that the only way for me, now HD is in place, is to lay the facial hair directly to the skin. This is such a specialised technique, and thank goodness more English artists are learning the art: no more lace beards on main actors for me, laying on is the only way. Jana is a genius, Matt had never had this method applied to him before and he was over the moon. In fact, he was so impressed with Jana and Maralyn that he took them to China the moment we finished filming, straight onto his next movie. You can imagine how proud I was of them!
Jana and Maralyn
Well everybody, I am now going to talk about those starting out in the film industry and what I find and look for in assistants and trainees. There are a number of things which are vital to the harmony of working so closely together on a trailer for many hours at a time: loyalty, no back-stabbing, politeness, kindness, and the willingness to work very hard without complaining.
I always manage to end up with the dream team, I think I have been so lucky in the people I have chosen to work with me. The secret is to treat everybody the same and I make sure the younger members juniors and trainees understand exactly what is expected of them. I make it clear they can come to me anytime if something is worrying them, there is no problem which can’t be solved. My motto is kindness – treat all as equal.
That’s all until next time, when I would like to talk about some of my favourite products.
Love Tina x
You can follow Tina on Instagram and Twitter @TheTinaEarnshaw
If you haven’t checked out Tina’s beautiful brush range, now is the time. Tina has kindly given Warpaint readers a code for 30% off her brushes (brush rolls excluded). Enter the code GOEZMSO into the Coupons box at the online checkout to redeem your discount. Happy shopping.
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