Our last photoshoot for The Black Light Magazine involved some serious production effort, including the work of two models and two makeup artists. In addition to learning a lot about black light photography, I am discovering that some of the most interesting and educational work for me personally is the follow-up writing of the blog posts describing these photoshoots. In this case in particular, I had an opportunity to interview one of the artists. We talked over Skype and went into the details of the airbrushing technique, in which I have a personal interest through my fascination with the painting of model tanks and dioramas. Below is the post that I wrote for TBLM.
Following a recent Tron-themed photoshoot featuring the spectacular makeup and body painting of Jennifer Walton (Jenny Jenn on Facebook), we had a chance to chat with her to find our more about her background, inspirations and current work. For me personally, it was an incredibly educational experience to see Jenny use her airbrush to apply fluorescent patterns that she created on the spot to the model’s body. I found that her technique was both versatile and restrained – combination that produced a strong visual impact while retaining a unique personal style.
When asked to describe her work in a couple of words, Jenny replied that most of her art was airbrushed, and that she created both canvasses and body paintings.
Jenny’s artistic education involve studying graphic design in college, but she began drawing when she was a child. Jenny loved art for as long as she can remember, and she had many opportunities to pursue it by going to art camps, shows, etc. At grade 10, her art teacher encourage Jenny to learn drawing in pen. The fact that one cannot easily erase pen drawings teaches the artist to work with any mistakes she might make along the way. Jenny found this skill crucial to building her confidence and ultimately to enjoying drawing and painting.
As far as her biggest achievement to-date, Jenny considers it to be her work with Evan Biddell, the winner of the first Project Runway Canada, at the Toronto Arts & Fashion Week last April (2015). Jenny introduced the black light-activated florescent paints to create reptile-skin patterns on the clothes and the models’ bodies. The effects have not been used in the industry until that point, and the collaboration of Jenny and Evan earned them considerable international acclaim.
Jenny has been perfecting her body painting techniques for the past seven years. She became involved in it by entering a body painting competition without any prior experience or knowledge in this genre. She did all her work by a paintbrush and ended up winning the competition. This win led to her getting a job that involved painting fifteen performers at a festival. The winning brushed body-painting took Jenny five-and-a-half hours of non-stop work, so she was naturally concerned about speeding up the painting process.
Someone suggested to Jenny to use an airbrush, so she proceeded to order one on the Internet. Using it turned out to be so addictive that it became Jenny’s main tool. From learning the basic techniques to perfecting advanced layering and making her own stencils, she gradually developed her unique style. Jenny particularly enjoys seeing her characters literally come to life, when she paints them on a live model. This aspect of human interaction is what draws Jenny to body painting.
Last year, Jenny started to incorporate more free-hand (rather than stencilling) airbrushing into her work, which has become her main focus. Her most current work was a painting of a woman’s face that she created for the promotion campaign of The Conscious Goddess Festival, a creation of her friend Tamara Broughton. Jenny reflects on this work as being particularly challenging because it involved a new subject and also because of her personal connection with the project. Despite the challenges, or perhaps because of them, Jenny was pleased to see an improvement of her technique, compared to her earlier works.
Jenny’s artistic influences include Gustav Klimt and Alex Gray as well as the airbrush masters Terry Hill and Javier Soto. Last year, Jenny attended an intensive course on airbrushing techniques in Las vegas, where she met Jonathan Pantaleon, whose work has made a big impression on her.
In conclusion, I asked Jenny to share one piece of advice with someone, who might like to get involved in airbrushing. Her advice was: “Make sure your airbrush is always very clean.” This is, perhaps, not surprising, but Jenny emphasized that the very basic techniques, e. g. taking apart the airbrush for cleaning, which involves handling tiny, precision-manufactured details, is what many novice artists find most stressful. She also suggested developing a habit of always blowing air through the tip of airbrush periodically during painting in order to keep the tip clean during the work session. Blowing air through the tip is easily accomplished if one uses a dual-action airbrush, where pushing down on the trigger controls the flow of air, while pulling back on it controls the paint flow. Jenny also finds it helpful to use a compressor that can continuously sustain airflow, even when the brush is not in use. This helps her to avoid splatters at the beginning of the strokes.
In a typical painting session, Jenny uses two Iwata
We have been incredibly lucky to have an opportunity to collaborate with Jenny on several projects, and we look forward to tapping into her creativity showcasing more of her work in the future. In the mean time, she can be found on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/jenny.jenn.923
