A Haunting of Roses
Image Description
A figure’s head and shoulders are shown against an indistinct background. The figure’s head and top half of their face is covered with a mask/headdress made of faded pink, purple, white, and lavender roses. Some of the petals are covered with traces of cobwebs.
The figure’s lips are painted red, and their skin is alabaster. They have further strings of flowers around their neck, hanging down over their chest, similarly covered in cobwebs.
Artist’s Notes
The idea of a pale figure covered with dying roses and cobwebs has been a phantasmagorical apparition manifesting in my mind for several years now, but visually portraying it was a problem I couldn’t solve until now.
The mask was made from a Volto-style blank white mask from which I cut away the mouth, chin, and lower face.
I then removed the slender ribbons used to tie the mask to the head — my experience with such masks is that these ribbons are next to useless, even without any weight of decoration added to the mask — and replaced them with a much stronger set of thick elastic tapes adjusted with D-rings and Tri Glide slider buckles.
The mask was then covered with a selection of artificial flowers — mainly faded roses — attached using a glue gun.
The model’s flesh was painted with white body/face paint, with a touch of red for their lips, strings of artificial flowers were draped around their neck, and then the flowers were liberally sprayed with cobweb spray (the proper theatre/film set-dressing stuff, not the hallowe’en window decoration).
The photograph was taken in front of a printed backdrop cloth using a Canon EOS 7D digital SLR and lit with a single off-camera flash fitted with a medium-sized softbox and mounted at about 2 metres off the ground, and positioned at about 45° to the model’s left, angled downwards towards the model.
The only post-processing work was to reduce the saturation of the photograph.
See related blogpost: A Haunting of Roses.