- Oh, hello friends, it's me Ginny Di,
in case you didn't recognize me without makeup on.
I'm gonna be putting on makeup in this video
so it seemed like overkill to put it on
in order to take it off, in order to put it on.
If you follow many cosplayers,
you may have seen this meme going around,
it's a grid of six blank spaces,
and it says, "Give me six characters to make up test."
I asked for suggestions on Twitter
and I got a lot of great ideas.
So I picked some that I thought I would be capable of doing
with the wigs and resources that I have.
So this is part one,
I'm going to do the first two makeup tests in this video,
and then if you wanna contribute character suggestions
for parts two and three,
you can feel free to give me those in the comments.
Really quick for those of you who aren't cosplayers,
I wanted to just talk a little bit
about what a makeup test is and why cosplayers do them.
In general, the words makeup test or cos-test
are used to refer to doing the makeup and styling
of a character without necessarily
creating the entire costume.
There's a few different reasons to do cos-tests.
One is to just see how you look as a character,
and whether or not you like it,
especially if it's a character
that you might not feel that you suit.
It can be useful to do the makeup
and just see if you think it'll work
and if you'll be happy with it.
It could also be used to practice,
especially if it's a kind of makeup
that you haven't done before,
and you're not experienced with.
For example, I did a makeup test really early on,
while working on my Jester costume
because I had never done full face paint like that before.
And I didn't wanna be there on the day of the con
like doing that kind of makeup look for the first time
and risk it looking terrible.
Even just the difference between my first Jester makeup
and my second Jester makeup, is wild.
The amount that I learned
from just doing one makeup test, was extreme.
Finally, some people do makeup tests
because they don't necessarily wanna make an entire costume
or they can't make an entire costume
and they still wanna do something with the character.
Makeup tests are a really budget friendly way
to just kind of dip your toes into cosplay
or to create new content in between full costumes
if you're the kind of person who takes a long time
to create a single costume.
Anyway, that's why some people do them.
Today we are gonna do two for this challenge
and I'm excited to show you, so let's do it.
(playful upbeat music)
(fizz sound)
Constant caffeine that's how we do it around here.
Okay, the first makeup test is going to be Yasha
from Critical Role,
which is why I've already put in contacts,
one purple, one blue.
Just to head this off,
I don't recommend colored contact lens companies.
I don't like that people look to influencers
for that information instead of their eye doctor,
so please don't ask me where I got them from
because I'm not gonna tell you.
I got a bunch of different suggestions
for Critical Role characters.
Of course, since it's like a huge part
of my cosplay presence, and I got to tell you,
it was really hard to pick.
I didn't wanna end up
just doing all Critical Role characters,
but I got suggestions for Vex and Avantika,
and Ophelia Mardoon and a bunch of really cool suggestions.
I ended up picking Yasha,
because I felt confident that I had the wig
and the items that I would need to pull it off
without having to like buy any new materials.
And also because I feel like Yasha
has a really interesting makeup look
and I'm excited to recreate it.
Caitlin suggested Yasha,
because she knows that I'm currently
working on a Pike Trickfoot cosplay,
which is Ashley's character from campaign one,
and Yasha is Ashley's character from campaign two.
So there's a little bit of an Ashley parallel going on here.
One thing about Yasha,
is that she has really pale skin in the art,
and I know that a lot of people
actually paint their skin lighter for this costume.
I don't wanna do that for a few reasons.
One, is just that I feel like
it has a high potential to look like clownish,
another is that to be frank, I'm already pretty pale.
Plus if you make your face lighter,
you have to make your neck lighter,
you have to make your arms lighter,
it just becomes this whole thing.
However, I am going contour with more of a gray brown
to try and bring some of Yasha's pallid look into this.
And hopefully, that won't look real dumb.
You ever do a makeup thing,
and you're like, what the fuck is wrong with me?
Why would I do that?
So I'm gonna highlight first with just a white powder
and then I'm gonna go in with an actual highlighter.
And I think that'll contribute to the complexion too
in a way that isn't necessarily like painting my skin.
I don't wanna go too overboard.
Okay, and now we're finally into the fun part.
We get to do the eye makeup and the cool lip stripe.
I always struggled to get black eye makeup
looking black enough.
I don't know if I'm just using the wrong makeup or what.
And of course, I also get it all over my face.
I have this little thing from Elf that's like a shield,
it's supposed to keep your eye makeup
from going on to your cheeks.
I'm gonna start by just creating the shape
that I want for the eye shadow,
and then I'll go back in and I will darken it
with various things.
I have pretty hooded eyes,
so even like an arched line looks straight
when I just like look right ahead.
All right, the good news about this look
is that Yasha's makeup is so smudged underneath her eyes.
We don't have to do anything very precise.
Same reason that I like doing Ciri's makeup,
it's like almost impossible to mess up.
Knock on wood. Oh, shit.
Looks like I got punched in the face,
which is kind of on brand for Yasha.
I mean, mostly does the punching, but...
Jester, Yasha, I think it's pretty clear
that I just wanna cosplay characters
that Beau finds attractive.
Okay now, we've got to shape
and we need to make it all much darker.
So I'm gonna go in with my liquid eyeliner
and with an eyeliner pencil and really darken this up.
It's so funny, It took me a long time to appreciate Ashley
on Critical Role I think,
because in campaign one, and in campaign two,
she is absent a lot of the time,
and I think that her role play style is so sparse.
Compared to some of the other players,
I think she can tend to fade
into the background a little bit,
but when she does have the spotlight on her, she is so good,
and some of the scenes that are very Yasha centric
are some of my favorite scenes.
Like I just re watched the one where she and Nott
have a long conversation while keeping watch
and Nott accidentally spills the beans
about Caleb's backstory.
And that whole conversation is just so good.
I already feel like Sam is one of the better role-players
in the show, and them together is just gold.
I feel like for 90% of any of my makeup looks,
I just look terrible.
And like I'm as surprised as you guys,
when it comes out looking good at the end.
All right, start to look thoroughly freaky.
I'm wearing my orphan maker shirt for this
because I don't have anything that's even close
to a Yasha outfit, so that's like the best I can do.
Time for some strong brows.
We love a lady with strong brows, oh yeah.
Okay, I'm gonna do liquid liner over the pencil liner
and then I'm gonna do lashes just because I love them.
I've gotten a few negative comments on this channel
about my eyelashes lately.
And I know I wear really big eyelashes,
but it's because I fucking like them guys.
I'm gonna decide what kind of shit I wanna put on my face.
And if you don't like what I put on my face,
then like you're absolutely welcome to your opinion.
But if you voice that opinion in my space,
you're being rude,
and you're not allowed in my space anymore.
If you walked into my house,
if I invited you into my house
and I was like, "Come on in, have some coffee."
And if someone came into my house
and was like drinking my coffee
and they pointed to the pictures on my wall
and they were like, "That shit's ugly.
The things you put on your wall are ugly
and you should take them down."
I would be like, "Get out of my house."
I would encourage everyone
to see their online spaces as their house
and think about who you let in
and what you let them do while they're there.
Because you have that right to make those decisions.
See, you can barely even see these lashes
against the darkness of the eyeshadow anyway.
So, I just wanted them to exist.
I just want lashes to exist.
Okay, that's eyes done,
so now we're just gonna do the lips and the lips stripe,
and then we can put on the wig and we're done.
One of the other reasons
I've thought about cosplaying Yasha so much,
is that Jester and Nott both require body paint,
Beau has shaved sides, I don't have shaved sides,
and I don't really love how undercut wigs look,
so I don't think I would be happy with that.
So as far as like women of the core Mighty Nein group go,
Yasha's definitely like the easiest
in terms of just putting it all on and putting it together.
So yeah, sometimes I think about cosplaying Yasha
just 'cause I'm lazy.
So Yasha has like it's almost like a nude lip,
but it's only a nude lip if your skin tone
is really gray, which hers is.
So I have a nude lip shade, and I'm gonna try that,
and then I think I'm gonna go over it
with a little bit of eyeshadow to try and gray it up a bit.
This liner is like very pink,
but I don't have anything better,
and I really do wanna change my lip shape a little bit.
She has like a big upper lip,
with like a very subtle cupid's bow,
like a wide cupid's bow,
and that ain't me.
I have like the most forty's little cupid's bow,
it's like bloop.
Can't believe this is the most nude lip shade that I own,
and look how ugly it is, I never wear this.
I put it on my skin once, and I was like,
"Nope, never putting that on."
Huh, that's working great.
I look straight up dead. Okay, stripe time.
So I was not confident in my ability
to do this stripes straight,
so I think I'm gonna put some tape on my face.
I'm just using scotch tape.
Eh, I'm not gonna be able to talk.
I can tell if it's straight,
but at least it'll have sharp edges.
Hey Josh, come here.
- [Josh] Can I pee first?
- No, yeah.
(door creaks)
Can you bring me a little cup of water?
- [Josh] Yep.
- Thank you.
All right, I'm gonna mix up some face paint.
I feel like this is gonna be too wide, let's see.
Could have been worse.
It is really wide and it's not quite blue enough, balls.
Okay, we'll clean it up a little.
I feel like I might've been better off
just free handing it at this point.
I think that's as straight as it's gonna get.
That's okay, Yasha isn't straight, why should her stripe be?
All right, I'm gonna put on the wig,
and we'll see how it all looks together.
(upbeat music)
I smell like a crayon.
I'm sorry, I was trying to do the whole thing
like I killed my family, I'll throw you under a bridge.
I'm learning how to people.
I'm pretty pleased with how this came out,
especially considering that I sort of
whipped up this wig last night from my old Esmerelda wig.
I have grayed the ends with baby powder.
In general, I feel like I don't really have
the bone structure for these kinds of characters.
Like I have such a baby face,
I just look like a baby in war paint,
but I like this stripe, that's cool.
Probably not a full cosplay for me,
but this at least makes me feel like
I can pull off the vibe a little bit,
maybe, I don't know, what do you think?
♪ ...is ever gonna bring me down ♪
The next makeup test is going be Elphaba
from the musical Wicked
which is one of my favorite musicals.
And yes, I know that makes me basic
in the eyes of the musical theater crowd.
That's what I am, I guess I'm basic.
I just have never really had the opportunity
to see that many shows, so I'm only really familiar
with the ones that are the most famous
and that have big touring productions
and that have movies made of them.
I know it's unpopular to like movie musicals, but I do,
I really like them.
So, I've always loved Elphaba,
and have really related to her character,
and whenever I'm singing Wicked with another person,
I always sing her part in the songs.
But I never considered cosplaying her
because there was a huge chunk of time in my cosplay life
that I just absolutely refused to do any costume
that required face paint.
I didn't really know how to do it,
and I had seen a lot of people at conventions
do a bad job of it,
and I was so worried that I was gonna be one of those people
with like splotchy, poorly shaded face paint,
and that I was just gonna be embarrassed.
And I think I also like seriously overestimated
the discomfort associated with it.
In reality, it's really not too far off
from having a full face of foundation.
But because of that,
Elphaba never even really crossed my mind
as a possible cosplay.
And then I discovered Jester,
and now I face paint myself every two weeks.
I guess I just needed a character that I loved enough
to defeat my hatred of face paint.
I actually read the book of Wicked by Gregory McGuire
long before I saw the show,
and they are really different.
Like, of course they're different,
you can't directly translate a book into a musical,
that just wouldn't be possible.
And this isn't to say
that I think that the musical did anything wrong,
I think they did a really good job
adapting the source material for a stage show.
But the book is of course able
to tackle a lot more complex themes.
And even though Wicked as a show
is pretty dramatic and pretty dark in a lot of ways,
It's also a musical.
There are some subjects they tackle in the book
that you just really couldn't tackle in a musical.
Like it's strongly implied
that Elphie has some unusual stuff going on
with like sex and gender, not necessarily in her identity
but in her physical body.
When she's born, they at first think that she's a boy,
and then like realize that they were mistaken,
that she's actually a girl.
And later in a sex scene with Fiyero,
he like notices a weird shadow on her body
and he mentions how
she will only ever have sex with him in the dark,
and she like wears a sash around her waist.
That's the kind of stuff that, of course
that would be incredibly difficult
to explain in a musical even if you wanted to,
but I always really liked that.
I'm not sure if he was like trying
to do something specific with that,
or if he was just trying to contribute
to sort of the otherness of Elphaba as a character.
It's way harder to get inside your ears with a sponge
than a brush, let me tell you.
So I'm using the same paint color for this
that I used for my Nott makeup test.
It is a little bright for Elphaba.
So I think I'm gonna go over it
in this kind of metallic green eyeshadow,
just to kinda give it a little depth.
One of the things I do differently in my Jester makeup now
that I wasn't doing back when I first made my tutorial,
is that I have started going over all of the paint
with a blue powder, that is a little bit cooler,
a little bit more purple, than the paint color that I use.
It's partially to bring that color just a little bit closer
to my tights and gloves, but it also works really well
as both a sealant and a way to even out any patchy color.
It can be very, very difficult to get face paint
to be even, especially a color like blue.
I feel like colors with more warm tones,
like red or pink are a lot easier to get even on the skin,
but incidentally, a lot harder to wash off.
Okay, now I have a base,
so I am going to do some contouring.
I have this slightly darker metallic green eyeshadow,
that's also a little bit more yellow, which is great
because I feel like Elphie's shading on her face
in the musical at least, is often done with like gold tones.
Gotta have those witchy cheekbones.
One of the good things about cosplaying
a character like Elphaba, is that
she's been played by so many different people.
It's not like I'm trying to make my face
look like Idina Menzel,
instead, It's like I get to take
all of the hallmark features of Elphaba
like green skin and like witchy high cheekbones,
and whatever else I think represents her as a character
and just transpose them onto my own face.
Now, I'm just highlighting with this kind of shimmery yellow
from this tiny little green palette.
She doesn't really have blush in the makeup
that they do for the musical, so I am gonna skip that.
My paint water looks like some sort of noxious potion.
♪ Have another drink. ♪
♪ My dark eyed beauty ♪
♪ I've got one more night left here in town ♪
Okay, I'm going to do some eyeshadow.
I'm gonna start with this same dark green
that I used for my contour,
and then I'm gonna darken it up
with a couple like shimmery gold coppery tones
from a nudes palette.
Even if a character doesn't canonically have eye shadow,
I think it's always a good idea to do a little bit
of eye shadow in a body paint look.
Okay, brows.
We're just doing lots of bold black brows today.
I think I'm gonna have to paint my hands
'cause I don't have any like gloves this color,
and I really wanna be able to take pictures and video
with like my hands in the frame.
I hate painting my hands.
All right, I'm gonna do a liquid liner,
like I always do.
Do you know why everybody should learn
how to do a good winged liner?
♪ Because every one deserves a chance to fly ♪
You know, I think cosplay makeup
actually has a lot in common with stage makeup.
Both of them are meant to be viewed from a bit further away,
both of them are meant to be exaggerated,
often you're portraying a character
that doesn't necessarily look realistic or natural.
I think one of the biggest mistakes
that I see beginner cosplayers making
is under-doing or not doing makeup.
It can be so instrumental in communicating
just the aesthetic of a character.
And even a character
that doesn't appear to wear much makeup,
is probably wearing makeup.
Like Game Of Thrones is a great example.
Not many of the characters in Game Of Thrones
appear to be wearing makeup, but I guarantee you,
that they all are, because they're movie stars
and they're on like a major high budget film set.
The chances of any of us looking like Emilia Clarke
without makeup on... slim to none.
And I definitely fell into this trap early on
when cosplaying because I didn't really wear much makeup
in my day-to-day life.
So I wasn't good at it, and I didn't really understand
the impact that it could have.
I think it's kind of funny sometimes
to look back on what I perceived
as just like a normal face of makeup
five years ago versus now.
It used to be that a full face of makeup to me
was like concealer, blush, eyeliner, mascara.
Now a full face of makeup, is like primer, concealer,
foundation, contour, highlight, blush,
eyeliner, mascara, eyelashes, brows, lip liner, lipstick.
So yeah, today's hot tip for beginner cosplayers
is just watch makeup tutorials on YouTube,
learn to do makeup better.
I've learned all of my makeup
from watching videos online and practicing.
And I've learned it all just in the last few years too.
I didn't do makeup in high school,
I didn't even really do makeup in college.
All right, just the lip left,
I do not have a green lipstick.
So what I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna put on some ChapStick
and then I'm going blend eyeshadow into it
and hope that that works.
I'm gonna use this same eye shadow
that I contoured my cheekbones with.
Oh my God, it's working.
That's pretty good coverage honestly.
All right, final touch, I'm just gonna add
a touch of this kind of coppery red sparkly stuff
into the middle of the lip to more mimic
the way they do her lips on stage.
I think that just about does it, I'm gonna put on the wig
and the hat that I made last night because I'm really extra,
and then self indulgently sing a bunch of wicked songs.
(exuberant music)
It's just for the first time I feel wicked.
♪ And one day he'll say to me Elphaba ♪
♪ Girl, who is so superior ♪
♪ Shouldn't a girl who's so good inside ♪
♪ Have a matching exterior ♪
♪ And since folks here to an absurd degree ♪
♪ Seem fixated on you verdigris ♪
♪ Would it be all right by you ♪
♪ If I de-greenify you ♪
♪ Well of course that's not important to me ♪
♪ All right, why not ♪
♪ I'll reply, what a pair we'll be ♪
♪ The wizard and I ♪
♪ Yes what a pair we'll be ♪
♪ The wizard and I ♪
Here I am, back to my normal level of greenness.
This was a lot of fun,
I hope that you guys enjoyed it too.
I would love to do the other four makeup tests
on video like this.
If you have any suggestions for characters
you would like to see me do makeup tests for,
please put them into the comments.
I also wanted to mention that next week
I am releasing a brand new music video
featuring an original D&D themed love song that I wrote.
It's really cute, I hope that you like it.
And the most exciting part
is that I teamed up with Autumn Orange,
who is the creator of the amazing Critical Role
lofi albums you may have seen around.
Autumn Orange has created a remix of my original song
and it will be going up on their YouTube channel
on the same day that the song goes up on mine.
So make sure that you are subscribed to them,
so you don't miss that.
You can check out the rest of their music
on Spotify and other music streaming platforms
under the name, Autumn Orange,
and you can find them on Twitter at Sonic Vaughn.