Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Making Up Make-up Options

In my last report, I had stopped working on hairstyles and started working on updating and creating make-up options for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I spent quite a bit of time either creating or researching make-up options for clowns.

Sprint 2024-15: More make-up!

In Progress:

• Create make-up options

I replaced the placeholder smile and frown make-up options with a few variations that I think look a lot better.

Now I could create endless minor tweaks and variations on these mouths, and from what I could find, real clowns do have a wide variety of just mouth make-up, but I do want to make sure I address other kinds of make-up.

So I made an option for simple round cheek blush:

You can see I also added a smaller mouth.

It’s not bad, but I also know some people blend the blush, so I tried to make a blended variation, and I was surprised how much it hurts my eyes to look at!

See? Or, better yet, don’t! It’s kind of annoying. Some kind of optical effect between the bright, saturated colors and the blending makes it feel like it is fighting with your eyes. Does anyone reading this know what this effect might be called?

So I ended the week trying to find ways to address it, and while I think blending it even more helped a lot, I do wonder if there is something else I could try.

Anyway, now that I am getting rid of the placeholder art, I am pleased that the make-up layering is working out so well. Here is a clown that has buckteeth on top of a frown and with rosy cheeks:

I will say that researching clown make-up on the Internet is challenging, partly because there are a lot of tutorials and imagery out there for scary clowns or Halloween costumes. I have found better luck by specifying Ringling Bros or major organizations such as the International Clown Hall of Fame and Research Center (which I hope to visit soon!) or Clowns of America International.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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