For many ages, young and old, Halloween is an exciting holiday to eat one’s weight in candy, dress up as anybody (or anything) and get thrilled for a new season filled with pumpkin flavored everything and colder nights.

However, since most people usually don’t dress up as a witch for the remaining 364 days of the year, one might need help creating the perfect witch nose.

This month, four special effects makeup classes took place during Liberty Hour in the LMC Design Studio. The first class was an outline for the three following classes that focused on specific techniques. Anyone was welcome to join but there was a 15 person limit for each lesson.

According to junior Dylan Moran, the first session specified basic stuff as in what products to buy and where to buy them. The following three sessions dove more deeply into the topics of gore, fantasy and character makeup, which are the most popular concepts people go as.

The main purpose for the classes was to educate anyone who wanted to learn how to execute any character for a Halloween costume idea. Since special effects makeup is a bit out of the ordinary compared to everyday makeup, not a lot of people know how to do unconventional

styles for this holiday.

“It’s to teach people how to do special effects makeup for beginners since Halloween is coming up and we thought it’d be a really good idea to do it,” junior Heather Shipley said. “The classes are for anyone.”

The new addition of the Design Studio in the LMC will host time-related classes each month and will serve as a place for class projects.

“Just the timing of the year, with it being October, we thought it would be high interest,” librarian Lori Riedel said. “We’re trying to match whatever workshop project it is to something that’s happening, like the ones for Prom we would tie in.”

Makeup is just one of the multitude forms of art that doesn’t use the standard, everyday canvas. Special effects makeup has had a great influence on the media and is significant to people for different reasons.

“I feel like it’s important because it’s a different aspect of art, it’s not just you know ‘I’m putting paint on a piece of paper’ it’s more like ‘I’m creating something different on somebody else, like I’m transforming somebody else,’” Moran said. “Art is important because it involves every other aspect of the brain and you can go into all that logic but to me it’s just fun. It’s more of ‘I’m creating something that makes me happy’ and not just sitting in a class all day and learning about art, instead I’m actually creating art.”

Shipley has a different outlook on it.

“With special effects makeup it’s a lot like beauty makeup, where you use it to make someone look better or different or cool and in horror films it is so widely used,” Shipley said. “It’s a really valuable trait to have so I can do it for short films or people can do it for Halloween Haunt. On the internet and YouTube especially, there’s this huge cult following of special effects makeup artists which is really cool because people can express themselves and be creative in the most gruesome and gory ways, it’s awesome.”

Like many makeup gurus, they all started by watching an abundance of YouTube videos and tutorials on how to achieve the perfect eyeliner or how to contour your specific face shape the best.

“I saw a bunch of videos on YouTube and I just kind of thought it was interesting since I’ve always been interested in makeup since I taught myself and so I just started doing it,” sophomore Delaney Wahlert said. “I like to do gory makeup like burns and nasty stuff.”

Unlike track or band, an interest in special effects makeup doesn’t require a lot of time or money, all you need is an interest in art and a positive attitude.

“I think I just want to share my passion for it because when people see someone else that’s passionate about something it gets them kind of energized about it and I think it would be really fun to have more makeup artists running around the school. I’d love to mentor some people, I think that’d be a lot of fun,” Shipley said.

One of the countless benefits of being taught special effects makeup from a skilled mentor rather than going through the steps blindly is saving yourself from any embarrassing mistakes.

“I think people should come to these classes because it will help a lot instead of you just trying it on your own because for all of us, we are self taught and we had to experience all the ‘this is what went wrong during our special effects makeup’” Moran said. “We’ll tell you everything that you should or shouldn’t do because we didn’t get help with that and we want to help people.”

This group of students has teamed up with the LMC crew to teach students different makeup techniques to look like anyone from a frightening monster to a fairy princess to Harley Quinn in preparation for Halloween.

“I think most importantly it’s going to be fun, we’re going to have a good time and there’s not a better time to learn it than now,” Shipley said.