Oh hey, it’s me updating this blog good and timely. I’ll leave it to the next post to tell you where I’ve been devoting my energies to, but for this discussion, lets look at what I cooked up for Christmas.
I feel like I’ve done every conceivable holiday shoot in existence, so any ideas left are probably going to be further refinements of older ideas. And that’s fine. There’s plenty of room for different colors and improvements to old themes.
So I fleshed out 4 or 5 ideas, based on various sketches I made, some which date back a few years. First was a reindeer partial fursuit one, which would have taken advantage of some interesting reindeer facepaint.
Anyway, this one didn’t happen simply because the fake fur you can find in stores you’re basically limited to whatever’s available, and none of the fake furs seemed right. So then there were a few that are inspired by Dr Seuss’s Grinch story (And no, I wouldn’t do a sexy grinch, that makes no sense at all) First up was some sort of Who from whoville, but you don’t want to specifically look like a certain underage character. And yeah, In my search I found plenty of mainstream Grinch porn that went there, though were all like “She’s all grown up” Hmmmm… I think I’ll just stick to a more unspecific Whoville character…
Which is how I came up with this anthropomorphasized candy cane lady. To make this outfit work, I really wanted to emphasize diagonal stripes, and the majority of striped stockings I had were all just horizontal stripes. But this one was a contender.
Next up was something that was going to have a more classic, long haired pin up burlesque look, using green red and white as a peppermint theme. This outfit got as far as the hat, stockings and trim selection stage but the outfit didn’t happen because I just went for the simpler options.
Last up was something rather simple, kind of an elf on the shelf thing. In pinks, white fur and a hot green and pink stripes. Of course, all these ideas would change depending on what I could scrape up for accessories and what shoes I had to go with whatever.
From 5 ideas they got whittled down to 3, and then of those three, 2 happened, which is still much better than some years, where I had no Christmas shoot at all. So the first outfit became “Fun With Candy Canes”
The outfit itself was nothing more than pasties, stockings and gloves, and all the effort was to go to this hat, which I didn’t quite know how I was going to make. Do I buy a huge plastic candy cane lawn ornament and turn it into a hat? I could easily see spending too much money on making this thing, or like making it out of fibreglass or trying in vain to make the curves and stripes absolutely perfect. Instead I went the simpler route, just good ol’ paper-mache. Which is still tough when you’re trying to turn flat poster board into compound curves.
Blown up balloons were used to support it from being crushed and to make the end tip of the candycane, all while making it really lightweight. And I have to say, now that I have done fibreglass resin work (elsewhere, I was repairing a canoe) and paper mache, it’s really the same technique. The newspaper strips act pretty much like the fiberglass sheets, and then the flour and water paste acts like a resin. And I’m actually surprised at how strong the paper mache is once it’s all done. And no, I’m not expecting this hat to be waterproof, or withstand being crushed if someone sat on it, or worse still, I was wearing it and smashed it on a low door frame.
But paper mache looks like crap when it’s finished, and can’t be sanded or make to look smooth. Pretty much the only thing I could do is cover it with a velvety material and even at first, that didn’t work, but I kind of just worked it until it was, how should we say, consistently “handmade” looking. The goal wasn’t to look super shiny like actual candy.
And an outfit like this, it all comes down to the little details, the pasties and bows etc.
So the second outfit to make it to Christmas ended up being called “Pink Christmas”. This was the pink elf shoot. This also depended on what arrived off my amazon wish list (thank you!) and what I could throw together in a room that matched things well.
This one stayed pretty simple, and limited to the accessories and not bothering to make a full corset. It takes days to make a corset, and there’s usually multiple trips to the cloth store in the process. This was a case of “what do i have?” “What can I make out of it?”
There were lots of scraps of pink fur (back from my Easter Bunny fursuit I made ages ago), and I hadn’t yet shot anything in this little short spiky green wig I had. And glasses worked as well. Add to this that I got a Pink Christmas tree this year, and this made a nice shoot.
So this was the first shoot I shot, and the end result is very good. I had virtually nothing t touch up or alter in photoshop, except I tend to tweak the contrast a bit to suit my own tastes. But partway through the shoot, my last operational remote control for my Canon camera was dying.
Yes, I often do more than one shoot in one session, but this one was pretty tough considering that my remote was basically dead. As I self shoot all my own stuff, you’re pretty much screwed without that remote. And I’ve burned through something like 7 of them in as many years. The little “bubble buttons” wear out eventually. I did try to walk up to the camera, hit the shutter and then run back to position, but even then, the camera does dumb shit like set its focus when you hit the button, which means it focuses on you 2 feet away instead of 7 feet away. So I didn’t get as many gems out of this shoot as I would have liked. Still though, the best ones in this set were some of the best I have done ever.
Which is pretty much all you can expect. I have gotten two replacement remote controls since then, and one of them is an aftermarket one that has actual buttons on it that hopefully won’t wear out after 2000 shutter releases.
I got both these shoots up on my site, with a smaller “lewd” selection for my Patreon patrons. The holidays were nice, but I had to clear something off the decks before getting in the huge project I want to finish…
-Tara
2 Responses to Oh hey, Christmas shoots.