"Spiritual Weapon" — Before & After (Patreon)

What I did:

• Cleaned up the backdrop
• Painted in shadows
• Swapped out the tail with another photo
• Extended the lollipop stick
• Brightened the legs

Here's one of the Jester pin-ups, both before and after editing! These photos ultimately required very little editing in comparison to the other pin-ups I've done. That's partially because they were all on white backgrounds (so convenient for me!!) but it's also because of the makeup.

I'm not one of those people who changes the shape of my face in Photoshop or anything, but I do edit my face in photos. I clean up blemishes, I soften the dark bags under my eyes that an inconsistent sleep schedule and constant anxiety/stress so kindly grant me, and I'll correct for lighting/shadows when necessary. In pin-ups, this kind of editing is extra important because I'm trying to look like a painting, so the standards are even higher. For this reason, I'm used to spending quite a bit of time on beauty editing in these kind of photos. And yeah, I do often question how much of that is healthy and whether or not I'm setting a good example.

That's one of the things that has been so incredible about cosplaying Jester, with her crazy full-coverage makeup look: Other than touching up some pink showing on the inside of my lips, my face in this photo has not been edited at all.

That might not sound like a big deal to some of you, but as someone who spends rather a lot of time correcting "flaws" on my own face in Photoshop and beauty apps, and as someone who sometimes, as a result, looks in the mirror and feels disgusted by the actual flesh-and-bone, un-Photoshoppable real life face that I see, it just feels so good to be able to take a photo and say "Yeah, that's me. That's what I look like."

I guess the next step is to get to that point of confidence when I'm NOT painted blue. 😜