I've had a lovely evening tonight...! Last week a lady called Liz sent me an email on behalf of her daughter Emily, after coming across pictures of my SFX work online. She asked if it was possible to arrange a date to meet to talk about what I do. Emily is in her GCSE year in school and absolutely loves Special FX makeup. She wants to persue it as a career path once she has finished school so wanted to know how I got into it, where I trained and also just have a chit chat about makeup in general. I was happy to meet them both and honoured that they wanted to talk to me.
Emily and her mum travelled down from Llandeilo, just to meet me, so I wanted to help them as much as possible. I still feel new to all of this myself so to have someone interested in my work, the way I am with other amazing artists', is quite overwhelming. Of course i've been doing makeup for years now but only been 'going it alone' since the beginning of the year. I don't see myself as anyone special so to know that my work and knowledge could make a difference to someones life is really humbling.
We started off just chatting about how I came across Delamar Academy, applying to go there, what I learnt from the course and my life during my year in London. I absolutely loved the course, but being a home bird like I am made it quite hard at times. My life outside of the course wasn't easy at times either but because the work load and amount of things to learn was so intense, most of free time was spent going over things I had done in class. Luckily for Emily she said she wouldn't mind living in London and is used to the lifestyle anyway.
After chatting about how I got to what I'm doing today I showed Emily the bits of kit I use for my SFX makeups and she showed me a few photos of the ones she's tried for herself. She's done a brilliant job with them and is so passionate about it, which makes it half the battle. I then asked her if she wanted me to show her anything so I did a small cut on my hand, using my usual wax and would fillers, so she could see how I did it. Liz took some pictures for Emily's portfolio in school of the cut, my kit and also some of us together.
It was lovely meeting the both of them and I wish Emily all the luck in the world for her GCSE's and her future. I've told them to keep in touch so I hope they will!
Jess x