Zenith – Brianna Sauter

Brianna Sauter and Jackie Owen

For the rest of the school year, Jackie and I will be working on our Zenith Project. In order to get our project approved, we had to answer 3 questions that helped us create a project proposal.

What is your project? Why is this particular project a passion for you? Discuss the final media form as well as the content you envision.

For our Zenith Project, we will be studying color theory and using that knowledge in order to do makeup on different models that don’t hide what they believe to be “imperfections” and instead puts more focus on highlighting their key features and natural beauty. An infographic/chart will be created with Adobe Illustrator and Indesign to show various eye colors and complexions that coordinate best with certain colors. We will be photographing the looks that we will create to work for each model to give examples and allow us to further expand our knowledge of portrait photography. We are trying to work to incorporate all women/men of different races, sizes, and skin types to appeal to a larger crowd. This particular project is a passion for us because we both believe in inclusivity and want to campaign that brands should not just market to one type of person, and instead to all skin tones and skin types.

Media we will be using:

Photography (to take photos of our models)
Cosmetology (Study of makeup and practice of it)
Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Indesign

Final Media Form: We are thinking about possibly creating two pages from a magazine that displays our infographic, photos, and a little write up about color theory and inclusivity.

How is this project a new challenge (a risk) for you?

This Zenith project is a new challenge for both of us because we will both have to work to improve our photography skills since neither of us has much experience, especially when it comes to portrait photography. How we portray our project to people so that they take interest in it and wish to participate may be difficult if we don’t find interesting ways to catch their attention. Being that we live in a world full of people always trying to look perfect, it may be hard to convince people that they don’t need to hide features to make them look more “beautiful” instead find ways to accentuate their key features. One thing that will be difficult is finding a way to do the makeup and still show that people don’t need it to be beautiful and that everyone is naturally beautiful in their own way.

How will you incorporate your production class skills (new or existing) into your Project?

For our Production Class, Design, we will be incorporating a couple of our production skills into our project. In Design, we learned about complementary colors, and we will be using this knowledge of color theory during the process of choosing what colors we will use to best show off each person’s’ complexion. Not only will we be doing this, but we will also be improving our photography skills by taking photos of our models after we do their makeup. We were also considering using our Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator skills to edit the photos (saturation, tone, etc.) and create an infographic about coordinating eye colors and skin tone with shades of makeup.

WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO?

Over the last couple of weeks, Jackie and I have been doing both natural daytime makeup looks and bolder nighttime looks on our models. After doing their makeup, we took some photos of them against a background that we set up. We then used adobe photoshop to adjust the lighting and use the sharpen tool to enhance their features.

Ashleigh, our first model, poses for the camera.

This is one of our natural looks that was meant to bring out Ashleigh’s blue eyes.

We used tones of gold and bronze in order to make Emma’s brown eyes stand out.

Behind the scenes- editing Ashleigh’s photo

Applying the Gaussian Blur to Emma’s photo

After taking every models photo and editing it, we created an infographic. Each eye color has certain shades that make them stand out, so we used the color wheel to find them. We created “palettes” for every eye color so readers can use it as a guide for how to do their makeup if they want to highlight their eyes.

We used the color wheel as the inside of an eye on our first page of the infographic.

The second page of the infographic has “palettes” that readers can use as guides.

Final Product

Here is the digital version of our completed magazine. Hope you enjoy!

Zenith Reflection

In our English class, we were asked to write up a reflection on our Zenith project, record it, and create cover art. Here is my recorded reflection.