CELEBRITY TRANSFORMATIONS

PAYING TRIBUTE AS TUTORIALS (2009-2016)

Music has been one of my sources of respite, inspiration and celebration and when I wanted to create makeup tutorials for people to follow, I wanted to touch base on looks that I couldn’t personally find. I wanted to build a storybook of people I really enjoyed and looked up to and the basis of my inspirations came from pop music. My musical idols are definitely people who combine visual experiments with amazing music and I wanted to start off slowly with the legends, then build into pop culture references that were my personal favorites. My focus was to bring attention to other LGBT artists from Candy Darling to Jimmy James, to people who had made an impact on me and my work in transformation.

Every time I started to do a transformation I received a lot of backlash and my first attempt at Marilyn was so negatively received I actually took it down, so I was never into this project. When I created the music video makeup looks of contemporary pop videos, it was more so a way of getting people to find me, it was a strange one because my style is distinct, I create illusions in space, I don't use sketches as a way of changing the features, but I change the space in between, so it's a very sophisticated style and the polish is higher than painting an image across your features that do not translate to 3D. So I think these were a bit before their time.

I found out my first music video transformation of Miley Cyrus had gone viral on Buzzfeed, the Daily Mail, and over 100 news outlets around the world, during 2013. It was outrageous they were putting my videos on Czech news and creating headlines around it. So I was contacted by Now Magazine who featured me in their weekly beauty column in the UK, it got such an amazing response I was invited to come back and makeover their beauty team.

I then became synonymous with digital transformations and my work was the first that bridged illusion and homage, but from an LGBT perspective. I was inspired by drag elders and so I am blown away with how many people have started to experiment with what they can become, from my work in this format. I got asked to be part of a university course in Toronto about my work in 2019 which was crazy, and Google asked me to be in the End of Year Highlights video that was posted to over 40m people; to create a segment around David Bowie which was an amazing accomplishment as a creative. I was the home page and wanted to link that success with my new work as a creator, so I started to merge digital artwork and photography with makeup to create full transformations like Michael Jackson, Madonna and they were purposed for an insert of a coffee table book. I wanted a pattern that lined the cover and I thought it would be a tribute that would link the two passions. So I'm super proud of this series and would have expanded it.

Some of my first ever supermodel looks giving homage to my favourites and some hollywood beauties.

Check out one of my favourites below - Not a musician as I also expanded into actors and beauty icons from Liz Taylor to Angelina Jolie. Marilyn is the one though! I was surprised how similar I could make my features resemble the proportions. I also got to do my transformations on loads of other people from the amazing François Sagat in drag for the cover of Loverboy Magazine which became a collectable item and has been tattooed on people ahha!

Iconique or what?

Check out some of my favourite features below.