We had a really good time putting makeup on aliens tonight in my livestream~
i’m so salty i missed this livestream because these pics are great and i need to know what’s the conversation that led to G’kar having piercings and blush on his forehead (which is GREAT i love this detail so much)
Piercings was literally, ‘Fuck it I don’t care if it’s bone, omg, put some piercings on him’ “uh, okay, right here?” “OOOOOOMMMMMMMGGGG”
The blush on his head was sort of an extension of many things. I made some observations about the kinds of things that Humans do when we use makeup - it’s to emphasize features that we like - and we use it for different things.
So I thought of putting red around his eyes the way that humans often put white there to make it artificially larger. And then we did some stuff with covering Londo in some blush and glitter, and then we were talking about Bedazzling G’Kar’s spots (and then Londo’s head, which I imagined sounding like a staple gun), and that led to me thinking about contouring and ganguro girls plus our contemplation of wedding ceremonies from two different planets and how one would change the tone of them completely based on expectations of the people involved and…. Basically, the blush and piercings and everything about the last one was ‘ceremonial/formal’, and the makeup here going around his entire eye orbit was us all considering that aliens might want the makeup in other places than just directly on the upper lid, which is why a lot of Londo’s is on the under side of his eye and has a wing shape to match his eyebrows.
Like, don’t get me wrong, we had a really wacky time, I was laughing and shrieking and several people were type-laughing and yelling, and we tried a lot of things and had sudden “oooooo” moments of surprise when something looked really good, but we also made some thoughtful decisions about what to put on them and why and had big sprawling conversations about representation in sci-fi, dudebros ruining everything, ‘masculinization = legitimization’ and subverting that… Basically, a firm stance that this was not something we were doing like, ‘lol, middle aged alien men in makeup!’ We’re having fun, but it’s not a joke, it’s genuine expression and thoughtful shit. It’s the same any time I do things like put male characters in dresses. I try to be very careful not to draw things that mark this stuff as a parody. Funny not because ‘lol, doing girl stuff!’ but funny because of the situations or the characters. Because we liked imagining them having a silent blingy coldwar, not because of the bling itself.
This stream ran long, so I don’t think it uploaded to my on demand library on its own, but I’ll try to get it uploaded along with several of the other long ones. They take ages to process, so they don’t come up until a long time after I’ve done the stream. The downside is that all you get is me talking and reacting to nothing since the chat isn’t logged, but it’s part of the experience anyway.
So there’s a condensed recap!
