How To Make A Zombie!

While I was making up the kid for Halloween I took some pictures of the various steps. The costume goes on first. Then the two-part rubber prosthesis is stuck to her face--in this case a fake pencil positioned to look like it was rammed through her face. Also I added a homemade prosthesis made out of latex and paper towel shreds, which looks nicely like her throat was ripped out. What can I say, middle school can be tough.

Next comes the first layer of makeup--shadows around the eyes, bruising around the wounds.

The trick to makeup is thinking about what real wounds look like--they are never just one color, they are shades of red, purple and yellow. And blending. Lord, do ya ever have to blend and blend and blend.

More detail, with white pancake applied all over and some veining on her forehead. By now she's getting into character and hamming it up a bit.

Final makeup touches, finished with white powder to set the makeup and some fresh blood--after all, zombies gotta eat.

My lil' zombie!

We drove into town to take her trick or treating, and decided that we would skip being zombies ourselves...we could just see getting in a traffic accident and scaring the crap out of the emergency responders. We did go to a casino coffee shop for dinner afterwards though, where the kid drew all kinds of attention. As we were getting ready to eat an older couple stopped by our table on their way out, the husband dropping a five dollar bill in front of our daughter and saying cheerfully, 'That's for scaring my wife so badly she almost threw up!' His wife stood behind him, nodding energetically and laughing. We all laughed and thanked them.

Yay, zombies! Next year we have to find ourselves a good zombie crawl and attend. Or heck, if we can't find one, we'll start one...