4/5/10: Artistic Reference-America's Next Top Model

First off—year 3 of attending SakuraCon is complete and year 2 of ‘Successfully-avoiding-being-glomped-by-a-group-of-teenage-weaboos-jacked-up-on-pixie-sticks-dum-dums-and-Rockstars’ has also come to close. I believe the latter is the greater achievement. Maybe next year I’ll set up my own booth to make some extra cash; I’m interested to see what I’ll produced in the anime style using my vastly improved skills to illustrate a style I gave up 7 years ago. Anyways…

AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL:



Currently in its 14th season, America’s Next Top Model is one of my places to go when my creative wheel or color palette become rusty and dull. Every week brings a challenge to the contestants consisting of a photo shoot and surviving an industry related task, like visit 5 clients within 4 hours for photo shoots while getting around Japan. Each week, one contestant is sent home and the others are still in the running to win a great sum of money, a contract with a makeup company and an article in a fashion magazine.
This show does a great job reinventing classics (as in the Fairy Tale Characters photo shoot) and using models and sets to illustrate a message about beauty, politics and even the modeling industry (my favorite being the ‘portray a stereotype about models’ shoot).

Look. Put away your views on idealized body image, “reality” television, gender roles, racial identity and the use of photoshopping the results of these shoots, which determine the model that gets eliminated—and just see the pretty reference pictures this show produces. I’ve only ever watched the entire first season and I screamed at the judges and cursed Sally for taking Sarah’s makeup and laughed when a bigheaded contestant tripped on her first step on the runway. I would rather find the results of the shoots or put the series on mute while watching; because everyone has enough drama in their lives, I wouldn’t want anyone else to let that be the daily water cooler chat: “OMG, Can you believe Yasmin talked to Carrie like that?! I mean, it’s not like she’s responsible for her shoes. Besides, I think the judge were wrong; I mean Nikki didn’t even look pretty, unless you call that limp, dead-fish wrapped in a trash bag look attractive—“ And so on and so on.

WHAT TO GET OUT OF IT:

Colors and color combination. Yes even clown-palette can work if used off of professionals. Use many of the “Fierce” shoots that are towards the end of each season that consist of headshots with colorful makeup and props like feathers, yarn and sometimes even snakes. Trust me, put aside the more rigid selection of complementary colors and use the 80’s inspired shoots or the cirque de solei-esque results as your next swatch.

Body poses-these girls are encouraged to understand their bodies and use their limbs to create an expressive gesture relevant to the shoot and more interesting that standing straight and poofing out their lips. I’m trying desperately to find the episode for the season 13 cycle where the girls were dressed in Chinese-inspired dress and asked to fly around with kung-fu weapons and pose as if acting in movie during a wire-fu skirmish. All pictures I’ve seen are so dynamic and perfect for a character sketch and also helps me draw cloth that’s been wrapped around, whipped around and how it falls over the body.





HOW OFTEN:

If you familiarize yourself with the episodes, finding a reference picture shouldn’t be difficult. There are on average 75 pictures per season, even less if you consider that some of the weekly contests are video sample commercials. I use this reference as often as I need a new creative spark or I may look up the actual episode summary to use the photo shoot concept to springboard a project (Could you reinvent a baby picture of you to a more modern and sexy photo?).

SOURCES and LINKS:


TheCW website :

I prefer to google the different seasons and go to the resulting CW page. Unfortunately, while just following the link will get you to the show’s website, the pictures won’t be organized unless you search by season. This is the better source with the largest picture formats.


Tv.com:

Contains candid shots of the contestants (which may or may not be helpful to you-it really depends what you need as reference) as well as ALL final submitted shots of the models’ photo shoots from season 1 to the current season 14 (may be an episode or two delayed). The images are medium sized when opened separately, just enough to get the basics of form, light and color but won’t be as accurate for your 300dpi project. The pictures are organized by most current to oldest and grouped by contestant portfolio for their duration of the show.

IMDB:

Also has an impressive collection with many headshots of the judges, which I don’t need; and many of the earlier seasons and contestants are missing. More medium sized photos.

EDIT: Yahoo TV Shows: 1000+ photos of the contestants and the shoots