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I recently posted this ‘pop art’ look on my instagram, and was overwhelmed with the responses and kind words. Seeing as it got such an amazing response, I thought I’d go into a little more detail on the look, and provide more of a tutorial as to how YOU can recreate this easy pop art makeup look for beginners!
Pop art makeup is extremely fun and easy, so it’s perfect if you’re a beginner just starting to play around with makeup. A quick google search will provide lots of inspiration, and I combined lots of different ideas to create my look.
The first thing I did was prepare my skin. The most flawless base will always come from good skincare which will improve your confidence – that means both a morning and nighttime skin care routine! To prepare my skin for this look, I cleansed and toned using Kathleen products, moisturised with this Oxynergy Paris cream and applied lots of Burts Bees lip balm – we want to keep those lips hydrated!
Next, it’s time to move on to your foundation – as a pop art look is 2D, you don’t need to worry about contouring – you just want a flawless base. I used the Ten Image Professional All Day Make-up HD 18 Hour Foundation from my Seventa Makeup Academy Masterclass, applied with a beauty sponge, to even out my skin tone and create a thin base layer of foundation.
Now the next steps of our easy pop art makeup tutorial for beginners are brows! I filled in my eyebrows using a Bellapierre eyebrow pencil, and brushed them out so they looked more natural. Some pop art looks go for a heavier, darker brow than I went for, but I still wanted my brows to match my hair.
Now it’s time to create the fun pop art makeup! I did my lips first, as these are the hardest part of the look and need the most time. For the lips, I took inspiration from Jordan Hanz – mine don’t look anywhere near as good as hers, but I think it was a pretty good attempt, seeing as I didn’t have any white paint/wet products. I used a MUA Luxe Matte Liquid Lipstick in shade Criminal, and then a Black Barry M Lipstick with a thin MAC 209 brush to create the edges and shading. I mixed together a lip balm and white eyeshadow for the highlights, but white face paint would have been much more eye catching.
Now our lips are done, we can move on to the rest of the look. Some pop art looks don’t use any polka dots on the face, others cover their whole face. I saw this picture from jessicarose_makeup and loved the idea of only putting dots on parts of your face – but you can do as many or as little polka dots as you like! I used a red eyeshadow, wet my MAC 219 brush, and dotted it on. I wasn’t very accurate in where I was dotting it on, but you could of course be more precise for a more perfected finished look.
Next, we need to add the black outlines and accents to the look. This is the part of the look that creates the 2D affect of pop art. Some pictures that I saw online use very little outline, some outline the whole face. I decided to go for a bit of both – framing around my jaw, my cheekbone, my chin, cupids bow, nose, eyelid, and forehead. You can use these outline and accents to create emotion, if you wanted to! I used a wet MAC 209 brush and a black eyeshadow to create the lines. Again, I wasn’t the most precise, but the cleaner and sharper your lines are, the more 2D the overall affect will look – but this just proves that this pop art makeup look is a great one to start with if you’re a beginner, as even a rough, unfinished look will look effective and eye catching!
I also emphasised my lower lashes with black lines. I felt like the look was missing something around my eye area, as the eye area looked pretty boring in comparison to the rest of the look. Lots of pop arts incorporate tears into their look, as if your 2D character is crying. I decided to create a dramatic lower lash effect, and finished it off by popping on some Nouveau Lashes falsh lashes.
And voila! Your easy pop art makeup tutorial for beginners is finished! Although it might look a little daunting or complicated at first, it is actually such an easy look to recreate and perfect for beginners! And because pop art takes many forms, theres no right or wrong – you can experiment with lots of different colours and emotions, but just remember, you want your look to appear 2D and very bold!
Let me know in the comments below if you recreate this look, and please tag me in any photos on Instagram – I’d love to see how you get on!