Cinderella - Mouth Covering

Part of my design for my Cinderella makeup is a lost mouth to represent her and women in general having no voice This was an idea I took from two other stories from the original Grimm's brothers fairytales where girls lose their voice/mouth as a punishment and then become married to a King partly due to their lack of voice.

The Virgin Mary's Child

Zipes, J (ed.) ( 2014) The original folk and fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm: The complete first edition. Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press page. 19

The Twelve Brothers

Zipes, J (ed.) ( 2014) The original folk and fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm: The complete first edition. Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press page. 31

This represents that women don't need a voice to be attractive to a man (in many versions of Cinderella her and the prince barely exchange a word and especially after she leaves the ball. She also never saves herself and is always saved by other people) . It is going to be a flat piece I will sculpt to take away my models mouth. However this is also something that could be done afterwards in photoshop so I wanted to experiment with this too.

Photoshop

These were my attempts at photoshopping out the mouth on my model Livv. My first attempt wasn't that good and I believe it was harder as the in the photo Livv is turned slightly to one side creating more shadows on one side of the face. My other attempt is better but still looks very unnatural and fake. However doing this shows me this is an option for my makeup or if I do it in prosthetics I can then touch it up in photoshopping. In industry this may be more likely to be done in photoshop but I'd like to challenge myself and try it in prosthetics.

Prosthetic

I sculpted this by first measuring my models lips to find out what size I would need. I wanted to keep it as small as possible so that I didn't make the area surrounding the lips look unnatural and show that it is a prosthetic. I put a light skin texture all over the piece so that it looks natural and made sure it was blended well into the tile.

This was the first run of the mouth piece. I wanted to use silicone as it has the best skin like quality for a piece that needed to be very natural. I used a 50% mix as it was in the mouth area so I wanted it to be soft but too movable. I'm happy with how the piece cam out although there are a few breaks in it where the flashing wasn't filled up enough with silicone so it ripped with the pressure of pulling out the piece. Next time I would fill up the flashing more to get a better piece.

Health and Safety
Obviously there are health and safety issues with using a prosthetic over the mouth as it blocks one airway and prevents the model from drinking or eating. Because of this I will limit the time the model wears it for by as much as possible. I will apply it last thing I do before we leave for the location ( I will do all the models makeups first then go back to the Cinderella look and apply the mouthpiece) then when on location (a 5 minute walk) I will do the group shots first, followed by the Cinderella's individual shots so I can then remove the mouthpiece on location whilst the other models get shot - this means the maximum time the model will wear the piece for is 45 mins. Because I will be taking remover into the woods with me I can also remove it at any time if the model feels uncomfortable (if this happens I would then edit the mouth out in the post-edit)