Stiff displays talents through art of creative makeup
Coppell High School senior Taylor Stiff exhibits her talent by painting both her face and a classmate’s for an art project. Photo courtesy Taylor Stiff.
September 10, 2015
By Aisha Espinosa
Staff Writer
@aishaespinosa
Coppell High School senior Taylor Stiff lays her makeup out on her counter, and sets her camera up to get the perfect angle. With her face paint and other tutorial essentials at her disposal, she starts the creative process leading to her next video.
Her website dedicated to makeup tutorials, the Makeup Mask, first started with a drama class in middle school. Watching clips from well known musicals inspired her to create a Halloween costume based on the musical “Cats”. Stiff planned her costume for nearly a year in advance, and surprised her mom when she came down with the makeup on for the character Victoria, the all white cat.
“I was shocked,” Roma Stiff, Taylor’s mom, said. “She was just preparing for a Halloween costume in the bathroom, and when she came down I was amazed at what I saw because nobody taught her anything. She just looks in the mirror and does this, and I think that’s really a talent.”
After that Halloween costume, Taylor explored and experimented with different kinds of face paint and makeup. When an English project came around focusing on what a student wanted to do in life, she took the opportunity to look at a career in makeup.
“I made a video of the ‘Cats’ makeup and put it online for the project,” Stiff said. “And I kept it on there, because why not? And it got over 45,000 views. That’s pretty cool.”
Junior year, Stiff joined an independent study for art and decided to create a website to display her work for makeup enthusiasts and colleges. Her website includes a portfolio of all her makeup and photography sessions. CHS art teachers Elsa Reynolds and Tamera Westervelt helped Stiff by showing her different Photoshop edits for picture backgrounds.
“I got into pictures after that,” Stiff said. “And I tried to do a face paint every other week so I could edit the video and photos, and pick what to put on the website.”
Her site is full of her photos and tutorials, ranging from Haunted House work to art pieces for her art class. One of the art pieces she worked on qualified for the state level of the Visual Art Scholastic Event. Stiff won for the area competition held at CHS.
“It’s the one with the macaws in front of Student Services South, and she did a long photography shoot with one of the other students in the class that agreed to pose with her,” Westervelt said. “I was not surprised at all because she was a level three student, and for that level, it was an exceptional piece of artwork.”
For now, Stiff is focusing on her senior year and looking ahead to what may come. There are many career options she is considering, including broadcast journalism, art, and even something in the makeup industry.
“I would love to do this as a career,” Stiff said. “I think it would be really cool if I could be a makeup artist for movies or broadway. That would be really fun.”
Both her parents and her art teacher can see her pursuing a career that would let Stiff showcase her talent.
“That’s a contemporary thing going on right now, all the body painting, with models and even with forensic science,” Westervelt said. “Or if she wanted to do fashion, I think she’d be very successful in that too.”
