HOW TO HAVE A KAWAII PHOTOSHOOT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

Hi everyone! How are you? I decided that this month, I am going to be sharing some tutorials, and tips on stuff that interests me ranging from makeup, hair, cute stuff, graphic design, gyaru culture, etc. One of my old quotes are.. "I live life like a japanese fashion magazine - bright, colorful & cute with lots of pictures!" Anyway, I just want to share with the world what I love and have some fun, and I'm hoping you'll have fun too! DISCLAIMER: None of the stuff I share has to be taken seriously, take your own spin on it and be creative!

Okay, pinksugarichigo ~ get into the content already...


Bored and don't know what to do? Why not have a cute photoshoot with your friends? It doesn't have to be professional, it can be cheap and really fun!


About Our Photos:
My Happy Time photoshoot with Eat Juice was inspired by a lot of our interests: cute stuff, 80s, kawaii culture, himegyaru fashion, gyaru fashion, our love of the color pink, and of course, Spank! Fashion..



We took a lot of inspiration from these cute Spank! girls .. and of course, took our own spin on it and combined our other interests into the mix.



A lot of these things in our photoshoot can be found in thrift stores. Actually most of the stuff we have in this photoshoot are from thrift stores. If you're on Oahu, Hawaii ~ the best one I've been to is Savers in Waipahu, but there's also Kalihi as well. Here are the addresses:

Savers Waipahu
94-300 Farrington Hwy
Waipahu, Hawaii 96797
(808) 671-0071

Savers Kalihi
1505 Dillingham Blvd
Honolulu, HI
(808) 842-0061

Surprisingly , there are a lot of old 80s and 90s toys there. Look through the bins, they're hiding in there somewhere. They also sell premade bags filled with misc toys! They sell for a dollar or two I think. Definitely a great deal! I found a lot of cute My Little Ponies toys in there.


Here is some tips and suggestions of what you can get for your photoshoot. Again, these are only suggestions and tips.


Friends make everything more fun!

A backdrop ~ Old bedsheets with cartoon characters are always fun, a lot of cool ones can be found from thrift stores. Just be sure to wash the blanket first. I found a lot of barbie ones, as well as vintage minnie mouse sheets for like $4.00 which makes really cute backdrops :D You can also use fabric sheets from the fabric store.. I bought some really cool zebraprint fabric from Walmart ~ check them out, sometimes they sell cheap swatches of fabric, and have amazing deals. You can also search on ebay.com for sanrio fabric, like hello kitty or kuromi. They have a whole bunch of variety on there.


Get some props for your background...Stuffed plushies, animals and toys galore!!! Me and Eat Juice were in a addictive phase for "castles", and we bought a whole bunch from Savers. I also got old 80s and 90s toys including Care Bears, My Little Ponies, and Barbie stuff. I was looking for Popples but unfortunately could not find any. Some exceptions were the hello kitty toys which I bought from Sanrio, if you already have a lot of hello kitty toys throw that in as well! Overall, here are all the characters that I had in these photoshoot: Kuromi, Hello Kitty, Marie from Disney, Carebears, Rilakumma. Aside from that, I also had a few non-charactered items: pink bear and pink poodle. Another tip I can give you to is to stock up on cute toys during Easter season. They sell a lot of cute plushies like bears, and bunnies in really pretty pastel colors such as pink, blue, purple, etc. Those colored plastic eggs would be good for props too.


Balloons can also add a cute touch to your photos. We bought a pack of different colored balloons over from Party City in Waikele. Again, if you're on Oahu, Hawaii - here's the address:

Party City
Waikele Center
94-799 Lumiaina Street
Suite C
Waipahu, HI 96797
(808) 671-3133

We blew up the balloons ourselves. Easy peasy. If you have a helium machine, that'll be even better. Price Busters always sells fancy character ones too, like the ones for birthday parties if that's something you would like.


And yes, more props again! I forgot to mention you can use props to hold in the photo, too! In this case, I found these cool Disney Princess wands at Savers and they were so cheap! :D I later went to Disneyland and they were selling them for like $20 + so I saved a great deal. I also found this cool piano , neon pink with bright colors and they made a colorful addition to the photo.. Never tried to see if it still works though.. hmm oh well.

So anyway, now that you got the backdrop and props, it's time to ARRANGE AND DECORATE!

First off, find a room that you can use to arrange your backdrop and props. Even your bedroom is fine, in this case, we used Eat Juice's bedroom. We cleared an area nearby her bed, and used that space to set up. Her room was also perfect in that case, because she has huge windows, which let us use a lot of natural light during the day. However if you're in a dark place with few windows, or you're taking photos at night, you can of course use your home lighting including floor lamps, and track lights. No need to spend your money on expensive lighting unless you really want to. Don't have enough lighting? Borrow some from the other rooms!

Next, take your blanket or fabric and place them on your wall. For us, we used silly putty or something.. Bah, I forgot what it was called. All I know it was something sticky. We used a lot of it is all I remember. We didn't want to ruin Eat Juice's wall, so that seemed to work out best. But you can also use heavy duty duck tape or thumb tacks, or push pins.. those usually ruin the wall though, so I wouldn't recommend it.

After all that, arrange the floor area! I forgot to mention, you'll also need something for the floor. In this case, you can use another cute blanket like we did here. Or cute rugs. One thing I would have done different with this photoshoot is change the blanket out with some really cute hot pink furry rugs. Yeah, that would have been colorful.

Finally, arrange all your props! There's no right or wrong way to do it. The more props you put in, the more it will make an interesting and colorful photo. I'm not really for simplistic or bare minimum tastes, so the more, the better for me! But it's totally up to you!

And now, for the hair, makeup and clothes!


Here is a video of us talking about our look!


I'm not really going to get into detail about the hair and makeup, but I am planning to a hair and gyaru makeup tutorial later on, so please be on the lookout for that!

Anyway, I usually like to wear my hair curled like all the gyaru with their curled hair, so I curled my hair using the chi straightening iron. For the hair accessory, I added a big bow.

I love Eat Juice's hair because it's sleek and black, and volumized at the top. Just tease with your comb, and spray!

For clothes, we got inspiration from the following fashion styles : decora, himegyaru, spank!fashion, and haady gyaru. I'm not going to post any photos here, but feel to search them on google. You can also download japanese fashion magazine scans, which I recommend getting here:
http://livejournal.com/community/jmagazinescans
You need a livejournal account though.

Sidenote: Some of the japanese magazines I download are: Egg, Ageha, Popteen, Nylon, Nuts, Jelly, Glamorous, Kera, Zipper, etc.

Please watch the video, and it will give you details of where we got our clothes, shoes and stuff!



Finally, it's time to take your photos!!! Of course, you'll need a camera in this case. Preferably, a digital camera. If you don't have one, buy one or borrow!!! I'm sure someone you know has one. The one that I used for this photoshoot is a Canon, I have the PowerShot SD1000. After you get your camera, decide who's going to be taking the photos. Of course, if you all want to be in the photo at the same time, then get someone else to take your photos: your boyfriend, a sibling, a friend who's not going to be in the photoshoot. In this case, we had no one, so the self-timer on the camera was our friend for our group photos. We set up the camera by stacking shoe boxes on a chair, and just doing some test shots. The self timer was set to every 2 seconds for 10 shots. We had a lot of fun with that one.


Poses, expressions and stuff - We had no idea how to pose, but we made do. Some people are just natural in front of the camera, but we tried our best! This is for fun and no way professional, so feel free to be as weird or crazy as you want. We did however, scour Eat Juice's egg magazines for random poses, and try to imitate them. And you can take as many photos as you want, and just delete the pictures you don't like.


Upload and Editing Photos -That's another tutorial altogether, so I'm not going into too much detail here. I'll have adobe photoshop tutorials soon in this blog, so be on the lookout for that also. I did however, upload the photos on my imac, and used Adobe Photoshop to edit the photos using different tools- brightness/contrast, levels, curves, hue/saturation, blur, sharpen, etc.

See the Before And After Here

See the difference??

Anyway, that's bout it, I'm going to end it the entry with more photos! Enjoy! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! I appreciate and love comments, so please feel free to leave them and also follow this blog! I got more things I want to share with you in the near future! Anyway, that's it.. HAVE A PINKSUGARICHIGO FILLED DAY!



Happy Time Outtakes