Hi there kiddos, today, under strange circumstances, I present you with a tutorial that was shot at an actual royal castle in Warsaw.
This video takes part in the “royal winter break – online” program, which is a set of online events for young people
and takes place until 17th January. There’s a lot of cool thingies happening, singing workshops, virtual tours,
youtuber meet-ups and reading children stories.
All of this is in Polish so I’m not sure how much you’re interested on a scale of 1/10, but if it’s at least a solid 5, you can check the description box.
Fun fact: Polish alphabet has 32 letters and this is not at all what I'm saying here but nvm
Anyway 10/10 would recommend checking out our beautiful Polish castles, and in the meantime let's try to recreate an 18th century portrait.
My inspiration is mostly mid-century portraits. In a lot of them, women are depicted as the Roman goddess of spring and flowers, Flora
which is why there’s a lot of, well, flowers involved.
This hot fresh look is based on the painting from the Warsaw Royal Castle collection, which is a copy of a portrait of Duchess of Orleans as ✨Flora✨
So I’m basing this outfit on an 18th century shift. If you want to recreate this fresh 1744 fashion week look,
you can use some white shirt or blouse, preferably with some puffy sleeves and a neckline wide enough to get those shoulders nicely exposed
A large piece of fabric can be useful too, because on a lot of these portraits women are wrapped in shawl and fabrics
to the point they look like your neighbour shoveling the driveway during a snow storm.
But we'll be back to the piece of cloth later, right now let's focus on make up. What I'm doing is a mixture of modern products, history
and a complete lack of any make up skills so don't follow this too closely
First of all, I'm not using any white foundation because while duchess d'Orleans' face looks very pale, you can tell by the rest of her body it was most likely
her natural skin tone, possible amped up a bit by the painter.
I'm starting off with the blush, the brand doesn't matter, I don't know why I showed this, and you want there to be A LOT of blush.
As you can see I put some on, then realized it's not enough and resumed aggressively patting more blush on my face.
So some strong blush... is a mush(t) (awful joke, doesn't translate well either)
Ladies on those portraits sometimes have rosy eye lids - I went a little overboard, but it still looks pretty cool I think
And I'm using the very same blush over my lips, which is obviously super unprofessional, but looks nice
I also went right over my eyelashes with the tiniest bit of brown eyeshadow, so tiny in fact you can't see the difference
Then I cover the whole thing with powder, look at my cute vintage powder compact btw
Watch out and don't put powder inside your nose as I did, aand that's mostly it when it comes to make up.
With 18th century make up there's a tendency to go crazy, but if you actually study portraits from the era, it looks very natural (apart from the rosy cheeks).
Hair is definitely most complicated, but don't worry, it's absolutely doable
I'm starting off with trying to hide my parting, which proved to be unsuccessful, and take strands of my hair
I twist them, and pin it in place at the top of my head with a bobby pin.
bobby pins running away >:(
If your hair is long, you may want to take thinner strands of hair
Don't worry about the sad ends hanging loosely at the back, we'll deal with them later.
You can also try putting the front of your hair up without twisting the strands,
but I think the twisting adds more texture to it, which looks ~*more historical*~
Also it's a good idea to curl your hair with a curling iron first or curl it using rollers (that's what I did), it will make rolling the ends easier.
And that's how I twist the front strands, from one ear to the other.
Something didn't work out here so I'm doing this one again
Now we're taking care of the ends. I'm twisting them on my fingers and pinning them in place in a form of...
Not sure how to explain it, rolls?
Overall don't stress about it too much, if it works it works, if it doesn't you can cover it with flowers later and say it's on purpose
If there isn't enough hair for a roll somewhere, I'm picking additional strands from the back just to roll them.
Generally speaking, you want a row of small rolls moreless around where you usually put a crown braid.
[Here I'm struggling to translate "rolls" into Polish, bear with me]
Now for the lower part - the duchess has two small rolls underneath her ears
So I'm taking two strands of hair from behind each ear and pin the rest of the hair away,
so it doesn't all become a tangly mess
You can backcomb the strands so it's easier to roll them, I felt like doing it but then decided I'm too lazy and gave up
And then I'm rolling the strands in the direction of my nose, not sure if it makes sense
Something didn't quite work, so I did the same thing again
And then I did exactly the same on the other side.
Now just making sure it all looks moderately decent and then I'm taking care of the rest of the hair
You can braid it and pin the braid at the back of the head, or like me, figure out
that hey, I'm recreating a portrait, no ones gonna see the back anyway, and pin the hair into a bun.
When it's all pinned and moreless keeping shape, time for two things: first is giving it a generous spray
so it doesn't fall apart, and the second is using dry shampoo,
which does a nice job at imitating 18th century hair powder.
Of course I'm not going to do it in this room, because I'm a good citizen respecting our cultural heritage and not spraying over it.
This is what it looks like after spraying and you can see it went from a bird's nest to a grey bird's nest.
You can also see there's some horrific stuff happening at the top of my head,
but worry thee not, first of all - what are flowers for, second of all - no one's getting a portrait of the top of their head
When it comes to the flowers, it's just a prime selection of the smallest artificial flowers I could find at my local florists
which I cut, tore, set and then glued with a hot glue gun
If you want to make pinning them into your hair easier, you can glue them onto a piece of fleece
and then glue a hairclip to said fleece.
I'm using regular bobby pins anyway. I'm pinning the flowers at the side, as it is in the portrait
Another element is the flower garland which appears in many portraits of this kind
I made one using artificial flowers joined with wire, thread and glue
and I'm pinning the garland using a sewing pin (off-topic but I wanted to show off my 18th century style hussif aka sewing bag)
I'm pinning it diagonally, same as it is done in the portraits
And now getting back to the drapey fabric, it's something that appears very commonly in 18th century portraits,
though perhaps it's not as common in the "Flora" style portraits
but if you feel like your outfit is lacking, you can try it out and see what it looks like.
To make sure my pose is ultra-18th century, I'm having a look at the ways the women in the portraits are posing.
Some of them make really theatrical gestures, some are just standing around like it's their 50th day of posing
Because I was in the Canaletto Room (he was an 18th century landscape painter), I wanted to try out posing in front of an 18th century landscape
because similar landscapes often appeared in the backgrounds of those portraits.
I'm assuming you may not have an 18th century painting on your wall, so you can either paint something yourself,
print something out and hang it or just photoshop it.
But overall the effect is *bomb* so 10/10 would recommend a Canaletto background.
That is all I guess, if you feel like recreating a similar portrait go for it
You can post it somewhere online and tag me and I'll have a look
Aaand that is all, thanks and byee