Before taking my portrait photographs i need to plan exactly how my subject is going to look. The whole point of these portrait’s is to recreate my childhood friends looking like the characters we used to pretend to be while playing in the dens. I have started to see a pattern of each den having its own identity and character to it, which is what i want to reflect in the appearance of my portraits. The first portrait i am going to take is the ones which correspond to the den in the field down St Ouens. This den had a distinctly tribal feel to it so i began looking for inspiration of exactly what look i wanted my friend to have.

As i have spoken about i wanted to create a clear correlation between the den and the portrait’s so as this den was made up of oranges i decided that Orange was going to be the main colour colour used. I am therefore going to direct my subject to wear orange eye shadow shades to establish a link between the den and herself. The overall character of the den was also distinctly very tribal and African. I don’t want my subject to look too artificial and almost dressed up by using loads of face paint or anything but i do want to also create a tribal look to her appearance. I therefore looked at tribal face designs which you can see above for inspiration of adding some little touches that would convey a tribal atmosphere. I think i am going to go with the dots because they look somewhat understated and enhance the tribal feel to the image without going over the top. Lastly i wanted to make the hair appear a bit more dynamic so as you can see below i took inspiration from stereotypical feathers. Tribal is normally quite suggestive of being animalistic and close with animals and nature so i though that by adding a feather to my subjects hair would tie together this impression further.