Skin I'm In and Other Things

It occurred to me that I never gave you a review of the skins I had been testing out. Honestly there were some great tones there and I loved seeing that they were available. I especially like Cupcakes and YourShape & YourSkin as I think they did a good job of balancing the tones with the makeups. However, I didn't end up buying a single solitary skin--which is odd cause I'm a bit of a skin whore--because they each ended up having the same issue (except YS). The shape of my face (particularly eyes and mouth) changed so much that wearing them would make even me wonder who I was. They are great skins and as my partner pointed out if I wasn't so accustomed to seeing my face then it wouldn't bother me in the slightest. But because I have a thing about appearing like myself lol skins that don't allow me to do that don't get purchased. YS did it to a much less degree but the fatpacks were hard to choose from in the tone I like so I have momentarily held off on their purchase until something jumps out at me. I liked the skins at MAI too so if you are looking for darker skins try all of those stores and of course my favorites Laqroki, Rockberry and well you can't get them anymore but the old CHAI skins were great.

That actually leads into another discussion I was planning to have. Model's Workshop is a great avenue to learn new techniques and network and the like for new and old models. This last week was about learning to market your face. Our shapes, skins, hair, clothes are changed pretty readily as models but if your face changes dramatically from shot to shot then you are in a world of trouble. Because they don't identify you strongly with any look in particular. Topaz Joubert, CEO of Maniera, led the discussion along with Lola Baudin and Sami Kutanaga. I've never met Topaz but she did a great job of showing us transformations that managed to maintain their face as much as possible while refining their other characteristics into a unique overall appearance. She also emphasized that it wasn't bad to be flexible but to attempt to make yourself into a commodity (my words not hers). All in all it was a very good program and made several of us interested in participating in the academy including me. I haven't been pursuing more formal training for a while. Most of the new agencies I'm with require pretty regular rehearsals--some overlapping each other depending on the day--so I've been afforded opportunities to do a variety of things outside of classes. Each academy handles things a little differently but the overall course description seems to be constant among several of the better academies. Not to mention that there are a few that just aren't friendly to US work schedules. I can't be on SL at 12PST for classes---I'm still very much in the middle of my workday. The Maniera curriculum for the course I'm interested in seems to take what I've learned a few steps further and agrees with my schedule so it's a win win if I'm accepted. I'll let you know how that goes.

Beyond that I finally put up some new pictures on flikr from a few contests I did enter/planned on entering/or just took randomly. I'll try not to take a month between uploads again lol. See ya later.