Practice Makes Perfect! Improving Your Technique
When you are beginning your career as a professional Makeup Artist, and completing your training with a makeup school, you’ll hear and read a lot about improving your technique (with good reason!). This drive and desire to improve should carry on with you well beyond your completion of your studies, as a Makeup Artist there is always room to learn, and always new techniques to improve on and even ways to find a more efficient way of executing a certain look that you already know.
The way that you execute and improve your individual techniques, is entirely up to you as the artist, however there are quite a few methods that can increase your productivity and help you to be the best Makeup Artist that you can be!
1. Practice
There is nothing that will help you more than practice. Practicing on yourself, your family and friends, and eventually models will allow you to establish a variety of different techniques which will become second nature. It’s all about trying a look on different faces, eye shapes and skin types. Only after you feel comfortable with doing a look on a multitude of faces, can you say that you are on the right track to mastering a technique. This way, once you show up at a professional job, there will not be room for error.
2. Experiment
Yes, practice is the base, but experimentation will take your artistry to the next level. We are not just talking about experimenting with colors and playing around with individual techniques to make them your own, but also about trying different professional products and tools. You’ll never know what one new tool will replace two others in your kit and make your life that much easier. It’s also about what tool or type of brush you feel most comfortable executing a certain style with. What feels best in your hands is based upon individual preference; a truly successful Makeup Artist will figure out their own unique way of doing things through experimentation.
3. Read
This might sound like we are taking you back to school, but there are a few classic makeup books (and a variety of material available online!) that you’d be amazed at how much they can teach you on techniques. You’ll find loads of tips and how to’s that you might not have heard of before! A favorite makeup book is hands down Kevyn Aucoin's Making Faces. This book is a must have for aspiring Makeup Artists who are looking to learn the fundamental basics of beauty. Even if it was written in 1997, the steps here are still very useful and incredibly applicable today – classic beauty techniques never change! You'll find applications and techniques in this book, but also a lot of ways to create a variety of looks.
Some additional books that are recommended are Bobbi Brown’s Makeup Manual, Beauty and Living Beauty, this book will help you with executing a perfect natural makeup technique.
4. Go Online
Thanks to today’s trends and society, we literally have access to everything by just the click of a button - millions of makeup tutorials, articles, and inspiration pictures are at your fingertips. As a professional Makeup Artist you should consistently research new how to’s, trends, and innovations. Another incredible option is to browse through archives of old runway shows to view the makeup, and become inspired by the world of fashion, which is so closely intertwined with Makeup Artistry!
5. Keep Records
To see the progress in your work, always keep a record of the beauty looks you have tried. It is always a good idea to take a before and after picture. This way, after a while, you can go back and see what worked and what didn’t. Trust us, it is so much fun to go back and see how much your technique has improved! Sometimes you will not recognize your own work, and that’s the confidence boost you may need to practice more and more, and the encouragement to continuously strive to improve!
6. Always Go Back to Basics
This might seem useless as you go further in your career, but going back to the basics might truly be the best option. In makeup education, it is all about the foundation, what you learn and establish at the beginning of your journey. So whenever you feel like learning, consider going back to the beginning, watch tutorials and techniques that you learned ages ago, you may pick up something (with your added experience!) that you didn’t notice before! After you have had some experience, you’ll see these “basic” techniques with a much different eye, and this will bring another layer to your Makeup Artistry execution.
Improving your technique is about hard work and dedication. It is also about your desire to become better. Realistically, there is no such thing as perfection, but you should be aiming to be the best that you can be at all times. Take out your kit, find your inspiration and aim to become the best makeup artist out there. Oh and quick tip: don’t forget to have fun while at it!