I wanted to play around a jellyfish concept which involved painting and decorating the model. Its an idea I’ve been developing for a while to shoot in the pool but also wanted to see how it’ll look on land first.
I started with transparent umbrella from Kmart which I painted with white UV acrylic paints. For the tentacles I cut netted fabric from spotlight into thin strips and hot glued them onto the umbrella’s frame.
The longer tentacles are from a party cut out ribbon I came across as spotlight but only being paper based it won’t be used in the water.
Prior to the the shoot I tried to source some UV white bodypaint but not easy to come by so improvised. For airbrushing the model I used the acrylic UV paint diluted in water to coat the model. I then mixed it with other body paints to create some soft textures on the skin. For the hair we used neon hair spray though needed some more to really stand out. We switched to a neon wig halfway through the shoot. The lips we used Proaiir waterproof paints which later had to be dulled down as was a little too intense. Mixing more water with the white UV paint we dripped down to form more tentacle like textures on her body.
The backdrop had a lot of dried paint from previous shoots which I recycled and further painted on to create a simple scene.
Lighting
I did get lucky on Ebay though and picked up a 400watt UV cannon for $80AUD. These put out more UV light vs LED in cost comparison but are fairly large, fragile and take a while to warm up.
Shooting this project I used Canon 5DmIII and shifting between 70-200mm 2.8L, 100mm 2.8L Macro and 16-35mm f4L IS lenses.
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