Here it is as promised! A full peek into our day, the prep work, the behind the scenes and the final portraits from our #purplewarriorshoot. This will be a hefty post, so sit back and stay a minute. I’ll start with my WHY behind this creative project…click HERE to read it if you haven’t already. We did this shoot to honor a few strong and beautiful warriors. We see their fight, we admire their strength and we support them. Sending our good energy their way was a huge part of our mission in doing this shoot.
I’ve never actually styled a shoot or created anything like this before so it was an absolute adventure and challenge. I couldn’t have pulled this off without the help of some friends! Before we even get to the images, I have to shout out the individuals who made this happen for us. They saw my vision and got to work!! I’ll start with Linda Servin, who is a seamstress at Elvira’s High Fashion in downtown Lake Orion, MI. We were chaperoning our kids’ 3rd grade field trip when I pitched the idea to her. She was immediately on board and we spent over 5 hours on a Friday night in her shop putting together all things purple and tribal on her mannequin, named Sue. We were in the zone that night! I’ll never forget how much fun that was to create and totally lose all sense of time. Linda is awesome, she came out the day of the shoot and helped style all of our tribe gals, she drew all of the tribute tattoos on our wrists and she held the smoke bombs for our portraits! She also took a lot of the behind the scenes pictures and videos. I can’t thank her enough for her help. She’s amazing!!
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Next I’d like to recognize our makeup team!! Jeremy Craig and Eva Hulit are both Lake Orion High School students who have amazing talent in makeup artistry and have both done makeup for the school musicals. Eva specializes in special effects makeup and Jeremy does more beauty application, and both made an excellent team for our warrior shoot. They are super sweet and gave up their entire day to be a part of this project.
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Jeremy got creative with the left over lashes and some makeup in this shot! PINIMAGE
Next up, I want to recognize our creative hair stylists! My sister-in-law, Ashley Westlund (above left), of Salon West& Spa came all the way down from Escanaba to be a part of this special project. She’s one of the most giving people I know with a heart of gold. She’s amazing at what she does and I knew she’d nail this style! She brought my neice, Hadley, down as well so it was awesome to have our little ones watch their mama’s in action. Ash took this behind the scenes shot and I love how it captures the kids being a part of all of this. I can see our girls someday doing something creative together as well. PINIMAGE
Our second hair stylist on the scene was my neighbor, Alex Guidos. She does on location hair for wedding parties and this was my first time working with her. We think Alex did awesome work!!! Loved having her be a part of our team and our creative project. PINIMAGEPINIMAGE
I also need to give a special thanks to my dear friend, Tee Laforge, who volunteered to come help in the kitchen. We had a full day of grazing since there was no time to actually sit down and eat! She was good moral support and so happy she was here!! Last but not least, I need to thank my husband, Eric, for being extremely helpful with this entire project. I couldn’t do these things without his full support.
So how does one go about planning a shoot like this?
Well, STEP 1: create a inspiration board on Pinterest of course! Here’s a few of my pins
STEP 2: assemble style team
STEP 3: shop at Salvation Army and scavenge where ever you can to find clothes to fit the theme
STEP 4: put outfits together
STEP 5: create accessories (my favorite part) and don’t forget to put your kiddos, neighbors and anyone you can find to work!! We made like 15 pairs of feather earrings, hair pieces, etc.
I carefully planned out my location, but the weather changed our plans and we had to shoot in between bursts of rain showers. This made my job more challenging because we had to shoot near my house, which is basically surrounded by very green grass and trees. Not at all convenient for shooting/editing. So much green. Ugh. I ended up spending a crazy amount of time post-processing mainly “killing the grass” in our portraits. The lighting changed so much throughout the day with the crazy weather. Getting the colors between the background and the purple wardrobe to be consistent was really difficult for me. It’s been quite the learning experience in editing!
I’ll start with headshots of each of our Maisie Jane Senior Tribe girls, and then end this post with our portraits and behind the scenes shots. Enjoy!!
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Mrs. Anderson made it just on time to assist!! (notice the GREEN…insanity)
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If you haven’t read the WHY behind this shoot…go do it now so you understand the next few images. This one below is dedicated to Mrs. Wood “CW” and her fight against cancer. Praying every day for her!!
We stand proudly behind Mrs. Anderson and her fight against abuse.
We honor Alayna and remember her fondly as a friend.
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Okay, so we didn’t exactly know what we were doing with the smoke bomb, but got some pretty great laughs out of our first attempt!!
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Walking down the road to our location…look at this amazing tribe!
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I hope you enjoyed the peek into our day!! It was memorable, special, exciting, and most of all…super fun!!! I hope it captured the essence of strong warrior women who gracefully and intentionally fight for goodness, healing, wholeness and peace.
Thanks for following our adventure!
XO-Andrea & the Maisie Jane Senior Tribe
