Who Needs Paint? Artist Creates Celeb Portraits out of Makeup

Makeup artist Maxine Ayre was just doodling in front of her TV while watching modeling competition show "The Face" one night when she started sketching out the show’s star, supermodel Naomi Campbell. Soon, she had captured the 43-year-old beauty's facial contours, skin tone, and even eyebrow arches perfectly. And, within hours, she had created a flawless portrait of the star. So what's the big deal? Don't artists do stuff like this all the time? Sure, but not usually with materials they picked up at the makeup counter.

“Literally I just was playing around,” the Newcastle, England-based mother of four tells Yahoo Shine. “I was looking at her thinking how great it would be to be able to do a supermodel's makeup so I started messing around with one of my charts [outlines of faces on paper that makeup artists use to test out looks], putting foundation and eyeshadow on it, and soon it just turned into a picture of her whole face.”

Yep, Ayre made the entire portrait out of makeup. Using her favorite foundation (Illamasqua Rich Foundation, $39) she first created a canvas of the model's face, then layered on bronzer, loose powder, and colored eye shadow to create skin tone and bone structure, and then filled in the details with a prism of colored shadows and shimmer. “I mostly use powders because glosses and creamy things tend to smudge easily,” Ayre explains. And if you're looking to pick up some of that electric purple lipstick that she used for Campbell's pout, sadly, the shade doesn't actually exist and was concocted through a combination of lipsticks Ayre had in her kit. "I have no idea what colors I used," she admits, "a little bit of everything, I think."

Happy with the results, the 34-year-old began making more makeup-infused celebrity portraits, including those of Kim Kardashian, Beyonce,Cheryl Cole, Rosie Huntington Whitely, and Amber Rose. And while Kim K. looks like she dedicates a lot of time to getting that heavily made-up look every day, the reality star's mug was actually the easiest for Ayre to capture. "Her features are so symmetrical and even," she says. "It’s easy to recreate the composition of her face.”

After posting some of the images to Twitter, Ayre's work went viral and she quickly became inundated with requests from people around the world who want to have their own faces permanently documented in blush and eyeshadow. (She's done a few commissioned pieces so far, but won't reveal what she charged.) “It’s amazing, I’ve been a makeup artist for 16 years, and then practically overnight all this happens," she shares. The more famous she gets, of course, the pricier her artwork could become ... but only if Ayre can keep the pieces out of her family's line of fire. "I guess I need to put the portraits somewhere safe so the kids don’t spill anything on them."