Student work

A first piece of work almost always shows the same three things: a visible line where the base stops at the jaw, a hard edge on the eyeshadow, and a brow filled in at one uniform density from start to finish.

None of those is a lack of aptitude. All three have the same cause — more time was spent putting product on than blending it out. That is a habit, and habits are what a course exists to change.

It is worth naming them plainly because most students arrive convinced their own first attempt is unusually bad. It is not. It is the standard first attempt, and recognising it as such is the point of showing it.

By the middle of a course the technical faults have generally gone, and a different kind of mistake appears: a mistake of judgement. The makeup is clean, blended and well executed — and wrong for that face, or wrong for the light it was made for.

Students frequently read this as going backwards. It is the opposite. The hand is working; now the eye is being trained, and the eye takes longer.

This stage is the one most worth seeing before you enrol, because it is the stage nobody puts on a portfolio. Knowing it exists is what stops a student giving up in week four.

The last piece of work is assessed against one question: does the result match the brief it was made for? Not whether it is beautiful — whether it did the job it was set.

• The tone matches the neck, not only the face
• The base has no visible border anywhere
• Shadow gradients are continuous, with no edge you can point at
• The makeup suits the lighting it was actually made for
• The result is repeatable — meaning it was not an accident

Showing only the best results creates two false impressions: that everyone learns at the same speed, and that a first attempt ought to come out clean.

Both are untrue and both damage students, because a student compares her own first attempt with somebody else's last one and concludes she has no talent. That comparison is the single most common reason people stop.

A gallery that only contains finished work is a marketing asset. A record that shows the middle is a teaching tool, and this page is meant to be the second thing.

Work is published only with the author's agreement, and with her name attached if she asks for that. Consent is asked separately from enrolment, and declining changes nothing — not the teaching, not the certificate, not the assessment.

Some graduates go on to start their own profiles and take their own clients. That is the real outcome of a course, and it is a better measure of it than any photograph published on this site.

If you are considering the course and want to see the current work rather than a description of it, ask. The most recent examples are not always the ones already published here.