ZINE PROPOSAL
Growing up in Mumbai, Bollywood culture has been a big part of my life growing up. Seeing the glitz and glamour of all these Bollywood stars combined with my mother’s profession in dermatology sparked my passion for makeup and prosthetics.
My zine will be very personal to me. It is about my story of growth – coming from a broken family and moving to London alone at the age of eighteen to now being in a happy and content place in my life. Throughout my life, I have always hidden my emotions, even whilst I was struggling. Initially after moving to London, I was struggling mentally without any support as I did not have friends in my accommodation which made me feel lonely and depressed as I am naturally a social butterfly and an extreme extrovert. However now, I am happy to say that I have found a supportive circle of friends that make me feel loved and at home. I will be making this zine as an expression of my journey from depression to my current self which is happy and content.
My zine is titled “Metamorphosis” because I feel makeup is about transformation and concealing your flaws. For such a long time, I had become so used to hiding every negative emotion I felt. In the same way, when we look at butterflies, we only see the beauty and many times we forget the caterpillar that they once were. Like a butterfly, I have taken my time in my “cocoon” and now have emerged happy. I believe that all personal growth takes time and that the journey is beautiful.
The zine will consist of screenshots taken from a makeup tutorial I will be doing on myself. Each step of the makeup tutorial will be a visual representation of how I have concealed my flaws emotionally and use makeup to portray that visually. For example, when I cover the dark eye circles around my eyes, I am using concealer to hide that I have been crying. I am a naturally joyous and bubbly person that loves to socialise. I believe that human beings are all social creatures. I do not want to visually represent myself as someone who is sad, tired and lonely. The tutorial is my transformation to better express my natural self which is loving and sociable. The zine is an explanation of the symbolism of the steps I do for the makeup look in the tutorial.
EVALUATION
I started working on my zine over the Easter break. I first started working on creating a mind map thinking about what self meant to me and what my journey has been like till now. The only thing that came to my mind was how I always pretended to be happy and how currently I’m actually very happy with my life and everything that I have achieved. I really tried to come up with some idea for my self-shoot but couldn’t come up with anything that would best portray what I wanted to tell in my story. After talking to Carlyn she gave me the idea of doing a tutorial I felt that was the best way for me to make a makeup zine as with every step it would tell a story. I really thought that my photography was quite average but in all the three terms most of the pictures have been clicked by me and I think I have done a pretty good job considering they were all clicked on my phone and edited by me. I worked to try and maybe get a better camera for my main shoot of the zine that I did in the makeup room of the campus they were a little hazy and not high quality as I wanted them to be but still with very less to work with Nandini did a great job with that shoot. I also am so glad that this course didn’t make me change my mind and that I was 100% sure that I wanted to pursue the BA I had decided on before I entered this course. I had my doubts sometimes and also did speak to Carlyn about it and she told me that I have made the right choice and that I should stick to Hair, Makeup and Prosthetics for performance. Suzzane loved how I had executed my shoot though she asked me to make mood boards on all my shoots and that is a really good idea I will make sure I create one before every shoot so I am prepared for what to do and don’t waste any time. My biggest regret this term was that I left all the written work for the end as I don’t really enjoy doing that and hence I was so stressed before submission as I have a load of written work left. I should really stop doing that and should do it little by little so that I’m not stuck with it in the end. I am so glad that I completed every SDS task as soon as we were given it this helped me with balancing a good work and personal life as I had no stress with any of my edits or with my zine formatting and I could enjoy my week with my friends stress-free. I loved how my zine turned out and I also loved the overall experience of planning an entire PR event.