Big Mama Red got herself a blog.

Starting a blog had been on my to do list for ages. As in, since New Years Day. As it is now December 19th, I'm sitting here like well damn, now or never. So here ya go. This is blog post number one. Prepare yourself for all the embarrassing fun facts and utterly unnecessary information about my life that no one wanted to know. Under no circumstances do I promise this blog will be informative or well-written. And I'm probably gonna be the only one who reads it. But it'll be honest and snarky and maybe even humorous? At least if you're down to laugh at me.

Oh man, what a weird couple of months. I went out on a creative limb that resulted in a pretty massive failure a while back and then immediately went to hide under a rock to eat lots of chocolate and make only easy pretty things to calm my broken ego.

I had tried to run silicone prosthetics inside of two-part silicone moulds (Makeup friends, I know this sounds like a bad idea to begin with but trust me I had a theory which would have been awesome if it had worked, which SURPRISE!, it didn't). For the non-mould makers out there, this was kind of like trying to bake a brownie inside of a bundt cake and then being surprised when the brownie won't come out without you having to carve it with a meat cleaver. There were tears. Call my mother as a witness. I had tried this once before with medium success, so then gave it a shot on a larger project and, well, yeah no.

But ya know what, life isn't made for hiding under rocks and eating chocolate forever. (Believe me I've tried.) So I scraped my bruised ego up off the moulding table and rebuilt the project from the bottom up. By this time the job was over. The angry client had finally forgotten about me and I was able to rebuild in peace (and out of pocket). I chose a different creature, but gave myself some of the same design problems to solve. And this time I researched the shit out of it first. I broke down all the steps and pre-Alcoted the stone head and floated the clay off and remoulded and made corrected positives and blah blah technical details WHATEVER.

At the end of the day I came out with four encapsulated silicone pieces all from two-part stone moulds with aaalmost perfect cutting edges. I know that doesn't mean anything to anybody but it means EVERYTHING TO ME OKAY?? :)

So here's what I think. I think that failure is important. Its important because it shows you exactly where you are and what you still have to do. This makeup wasn't perfect. The eyebrow kind of sank down too far and some of the edges were still a little harsh and I didn't use the right kind of paint. So fire me.

Ya know what? No one can fire you when you take risks on your own time. So fuck em. Risk. Fail. Risk again.

**Kimberly Florian as the water creature, photo by Blake Griffin.**