Coloring
How do we make the wax look so much like skin?
Well, each head is colored with several thin layers of oil paint that absorbs into the wax giving it the translucently of human skin.
Our palette is made up of a variety of colors; different tones of yellow, brown, red, purple, blue and green. And if there’s any shade we don’t have, we can always make it by mixing different colors together!
If the celebrity has had a sitting the colorist will use the color samples collected during the sitting as a color guide. We use a variety of photographs, full head shots and close ups of the different features - eyes, lips, nose etc. We begin by applying a thin brown-purple base to the head. We then use red and green colors to map out the different warm and cool areas of the face. The colorist studies the photographs and identifies the many colors that go together to make up the skin tone. The flesh color is then created by building up thin layers of these colors. It is important to incorporate all of the minute details including veins and freckles. A ‘splatter’ technique is used to flick small dots of paint onto the head. The dots are blended together to sit on top of the detail and form another layer and different texture.