New vs. Old! Look from inside of my workflow!

Hello my Sweethearts!

Time of mild summer has come, which means it's a perfect time to shoot outdoors. No mosquitoes and less other flying "dragons". If you have good ideas and can prepare everything in time ofcourse.
You were asking me questions about the shoot for this month. And It's pretty hard questions, because I have few options in my mind and one of it includes maybe new model. The hard thing is to find perfect place and props for this shoot. For example: A boat ) My assistant is working hard on it, but it came out as really gard task.
On another hand I want to shoot something that I wanted for a long time. Something with forest creature. To acomplish this small desire, I found a small workshop with very talented craftlords. In a couple of days I'll have an opportunity to check out everything there and maybe borrow something to finish image of the character. My assistant will try to bring photos from that small trip, in case you're interested )

Today I wanted to share with you with another story from my workflow.
This story is about improving and planning. As an example I took my last Lich Queen photoshoot )

As some of you might know some time before I already did shoot with that character. But at that time almost everything came out not as great as I imagened. There weren't proper set, concept, make up and an assistant who can help and might handle shots that I didn't planned. So as my retouching skills weren't on proper level. I can't say that my skills a great, because i still need to learn more. (Some eastern and western photographers and retouchers are so good that sometimes I think the photography is not mine...ehhh...)
It was hard for me to look at that shoot, so I decided to reshoot it in proper way. First of all planning.
We needed something that might look like snowcave. Saltcave was a good match, it's white, has interesting structure and not cold.   
Two problems: it's small, about 10 square meters (wide-angle lens can solve it) and difficult to find proper "design". Funny thing, most of them had futuristic like walls, with LED lights. Looks bad, trust me )
At the end my assistant found one and we shot first part. Unfortunatelly we couldn't shoot second part, because cave closed due to bankruptcy a week later. We shot it anyway, but it was a big problem at that time )
Unlike my first Lich Queen shoot, when we used night city park as location, without proper light, where you can find problems from every stranger. As I remember we heard a lot of drunk people near our "improvised set". My advise, don't go for a walk late at night, never. Please stay safe my Friends!

As a second step, I totally changed all concept for the character. Mainly design and make up. If you look closely on the photo from old photoshoot (you'll see it below) we haven't done proper make up and decided to use white colored eye-lenses (which is not a great idea, because eye-sight is important and can show something about character's personality).
With all that character's face looks pale and it's hard to viewer focus on facial expression. It's crucial when you are working on erotic and cosplay field.
It works the same way as on stage. Theatre actors or singers usually do strong make up to enhance theit appearence, unless nobody will see what they are doing or look like.
As you see, in new shoot, I worked hard on model's make up to bring more details and accents. Specially eyes and lips.
Since our model looked not exactly like it needed for this character in my opinion, later on retouch, I changed a bit face structure. You can see differenes if compare. )
Overall it was a little bit complecated to retouch this project. I'm not talking about model's body shapes (it's something you need to rework always), but about the skintone. Lesson I learned from all my projects with full body paint - paint tends to wash out and in the end you'll need to redraw almost everything. Maybe it's not the same when done by professional body-painter )

Only thing I enjoyed during Lich Queen project, was making lingerie for this character. My assistant thought that white on white on white would be not a great idea. But at the end everything turned out as I imagened )

Comparing this too images makes me think that I changed a lot from first Lich queen shoot. Thanks to you my Friends. Without your support I couldn't be where I am now. Desire to make people happy and constant work can change anybody. I still have a long road to become one day a true professional, so please watch over me and I'll try to bring you more great works, that might bring you joy )

This was my another small inside story. Hope it was interesting and I'll try to write more stories in future )

As always, Please stay healthy and happy my Friends!