I'M NOT DEAD

Yes, I am still very much alive.

So where have I been for the last two months? Well, I have something very exciting to announce...

.......I am now a qualified Freelance Make-up Artist!!

AOFM - Art of Freelance Make-up

The course spanned over a three week period with the first two weeks covering make-up and the third week covering hair styling.  My favourite lesson was our editorial/high fashion day taught by Jo Frost, the first assistant to the most influential and AMAZING make-up artist in the world - Pat McGrath.  She was very constuctive, gave us pointers, direction and was very down to earth.

The academy is located on Dean Street (Soho, London) and I enjoyed every second of it. Can't believe it's only been over a week since we finished! I am back in my full-time office job now and it's pretty deflating because more so than ever, I know this isn't what I want to do, it isn't... me. I NEED to keep it up, keep praticing the skills I have learnt or it'll be a complete waste of time. The next step is to get myself in the industry whether it be assisting for free or get a counter job for a make-up brand. Working at a Bobbi Brown counter would be my ideal job right now as I love the branding, the products and what the brand believes in. It won't be easy leaving a well paid full-time office job but if you are committed, you have to take the jump.

What I have discovered is that I am not a hair person. Don't really know why. I just don't... get it. I enjoyed learning techniques styling, setting, blowdrying, sectioning etc. but seriously, I only do make-up!

We had a professional photoshoot on the last day where we have to draft up a mood board of a beauty look and one editorial. These are some screen shots of how the editorial ones turned out:

We have to pay the photographer to photoshop pics that we like but we can have 10 copies of hi-res unretouched photos.  As I don't really have the budget, trying to pick 2 from 90 pics is really difficult!! These photos will be the start of my portfolio... hopefully there will be plenty more to come!

We also had a shopping day where we visited make-up stores such as Benefit, MAC, Bare Escentuals, Shu Uemura as a class and receive discounts of up to 35%. As you can imagine, most girls were saving their £££ for the MAC store, me included! We were given a 35% Mac Pro card for two weeks - here's a photo showing one of my many transactions from last week:

Kidding. The top two rows of eyeshadows aren't mine, they were bought by a fellow AOFM school friend but I asked her to put it next to mine to give the photo more impact, haha.

Anyway, as I am back to my normal routine I will try to upate more and maybe do another tutorial. Going on this course has opened up my eyes on applying make-up on different eye shapes. For so long I have only practiced on myself or other Asian friends and hardly on western eyes so I wasn't too confident with my skills. However, it became apparent that it was easier for me to adapt/adjust to western eyes than those applying make-up on my eyes! I felt bad... my eyes are so small... not much you can do to it!

Until then, hope everyone is having a lovely summer so far. Will be back to update shortly! See ya.