Tonight’s Episode (Airdate February 19th, 2013): Bugging Out

This week, the contestants struggle with lab mishaps and time-management issues to create a metamorphosis that makes everyone get a little Bug-gy.

Foundation Challenge

McKenzie introduces a Special Guest Judge for tonight’s Foundation Challenge, Lija Stewart, who works for Make Up Forever. In tonight’s Challenge, the artists must recreate an iconic female storybook character. The winner will receive immunity plus a special prize. Dany Sanz, Creator and Artistic Director of Make Up Forever appears on a monitor and announces that the winner will also receive a make-up case filled with all of her favorite products – a prize worth thousands of dollars! This news gets everyone excited, because make up is expensive!

Each model comes out holding a different fairy tale from which the character will be pulled. Wayne chooses Little Miss Muffet. Eric Z gets Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Eric F gets Little Red Riding Hood. Autumn chooses Snow White. Anthony takes Cinderella. Kris selects Gretel from Hansel and Gretel. Alam gets Sleeping Beauty. House gets Rapunzel and Megan gets Little Bo Peep. But…there is catch: the contestants must take the classic good girls and turn them into bad girls. Lija advises them to find something in the story to drive the transformation.

They have two hours to complete the challenge. Eric is looking through the generic prosthetics pile from which to ‘Frankenstein’ his character together. Eric Z looks forward to making Belle into a bad ass. House takes long white eyelashes to use as the base of his Rapunzel make up, and will make her face a ghostly white. Kris is using straight Beauty make up to make his Gretel a beautiful bad ass. Anthony decides that Cinderella has had her skin burned off from too much work in the cinders. He is using silicone to build up third-degree burns on her skin’s surface.

Alam is going to age her Sleeping Beauty to give the full on ‘Sleeping for 100 Years’ look. Meagan confesses that she does not know much about Bo Peep’s backstory so her vision will be to make her evil and mysterious. Wayne will turn Miss Muffet into a Spider with fangs. Autumn’s Snow White has a heart of ice so she now searches the land to devour the warm heart of a Prince. Time’s up!

Lija thinks the aging Snow White could have had her aging prosthetics blended better. Eric’s Red Riding Hood has been attacked by the big bad wolf and is mid-transformation into becoming a werewolf. Lija likes it. Lija calls Wayne’s Miss Muffet “Beautifully Evil” but maybe she could have had more make-up on.

Fave looks are Eric F’s Red Riding Hood for the makeshift prosthetics and the overall character he created. She also likes Wayne’s character’s fangs. The winner is Eric F, who is ecstatic not only to win immunity but also to get his hands on that priceless make-up kit. He is happy that for the next Spotlight Challenge he can get as crazy as he wants and have no fear.

Spotlight Challenge

As the artists enter the lab, McKenzie is waiting for them beside a series of monitor displays showing photographs of what look like colorful geometric designs. Each artist will choose one image, which will serve as inspiration for the challenge. With each having chosen their image, the point of view pulls back on each image so we can see that these are actually scanned electron microscope photos of different insects! Their challenge will be to create an original bug hybrid character inspired by their chosen photos. Here is what each artist chose:

Meagan gets a Sunset Moth
Alam chose a Grasshopper
Anthony has an Ant (appropriate)
Kris’s photo is of a Blue Morpho Butterfly
House gets a Honeybee
Wayne has a Firefly
Autumn chooses a Beetle
Eric Z has a Mosquito
Eric F is delighted with his Desert Wolf Spider

The judges will expect to see the microscopic photos reflected in their make-ups. Time to sketch!

Design Phase! Kris is concerned that his Butterfly wings may be too heavy.

The mosquito is considered to be scary by Eric Z. He doubts he will use the bright pink colors of his photo throughout the piece but he will incorporate them somehow. He’s going to make a chest piece and have the arms curled up and coming out of the mid torso.

Meagan says she chose her photo because she loves all of the colors, but when it was revealed to be a moth she became apprehensive because she’s never made wings. She’s afraid it will look more like a butterfly, so wants to incorporate a Moth’s hairiness into the body piece.

House’s priority is to nail the face sculpture. His concept is a half bee / half man hybrid. Wayne’s Firefly needs a glowing abdomen as a key element but his head sculpt already looks impressive. Eric F is happy with his spider as inspiration. He’s using QVC pipe and a latex and foam skin for his half human and half spider hybrid.

Alam admits to having caught grasshoppers as a child, then frying and eating them. She says they are surprisingly good and crunchy! She is playing with a lot color and texture and will probably use silicone.

Autumn loves having a “cool ass beetle bug!” She loves the green palette. Her creature’s face will be covered in mandibles and the eyes will be on top of the head to give it the right profile. She’s going to have fun with it.

Anthony thinks his Ant is very minimal and simple. He has in mind to do many sculpts and body / leg pieces but keeps losing his focus, and he fears ending up in the bottom. With no more time to conceptualize, and everyone so far ahead of him, he feels lost. He hopes he can just get something modeled and ready for foam before the day is done.

Wayne goes through a list of all the parts and pieces he still has to complete for his creature and hopes he can get it all done, as time is called.

It’s Day Two in the lab and everyone seems to have his or her work cut out for them. McKenzie and her dad, Michael Westmore, come in for their walk through and mentoring. Meagan is looking forward to any suggestions she can get. Westmore suggests she change-up her intended colors, so she can get the true colors to show through the fur that she’s going to put on the creature’s body.

Alam shows Westmore her ambitious color palette and he says for her to avoid complicating her life with so many colors. Wayne explains his concept and when Westmore cautions him about doing too much, he just says he can pull it off. Anthony is advised to make his Ant head sculpt large enough so that the judges can tell what the creature is.

Kris is still concerned about his wings being too heavy so he decides to make them out of foam core, which is very lightweight. Since Meagan’s and Kris’s creature both have wings, Meagan wants to make sure they are not doing anything too similar.

Alam’s silicone face piece is very colorful but it’s almost application day and she still has to do the wings, the legs and body of the Grasshopper.

It’s now Day Three, which means four hours to work on last looks before hitting the reveal stage. Time for the models to come in and for the transformation to begin! Kris has an issue with his mold not fitting together, so he is worried that his piece may not be usable. Wayne is working on incorporating the texture from his photo onto the wings of his creature. Eric Z observes that nobody’s really ‘sitting pretty’ at this point. Meagan hates the paint job on her wings. Anthony, Wayne and Alam are all panicking as time is called.

The Reveal

McKenzie welcomes the contestants back to the Reveal Stage and introduces Glenn, Ve and Neville. No guest judges tonight. Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.

House’s Honey Bee / Scientist Hybrid looks more like a grey alien to me. Not crazy about the paint job at all. He says he knows it is “not extraordinary,” which at this stage of the game could send him home.

Wayne’s Firefly is looking very Praying Mantis-like, which is a good thing. He did a very good job on the details, which include a well-articulated jaw, feelers and the glowing body element. He confesses that, to him, it feels unfinished.

Alam’s Grasshopper has a very beautiful paint job and she did a great job incorporating all of the colors from her photo. She’s worried about the edges and elements that she did not have time to finish.

Eric Z’s mosquito looks like the aviator of the insect world! He’s afraid his make up looks like more of a mask, which he was trying to avoid. The body sculpt has some cool details that I think the judges are going to dig.

Anthony’s Ant, for as much as he sweated it, came together pretty well. The head, abdomen and back sculpts all look well-made and the paint looks decent. He says at least it’s recognizable as an ant despite the fact that it’s wearing army fatigues on the lower half of its body!

Kris’s Butterfly, I like it. Great colors and he did a nice job on the wings.

I think that Autumn’s Beetle is the best work she’s done so far on the show. The creature’s mouth moves very naturally and you can tell she’s happy with it.

Eric F really took advantage of having the immunity award tonight to just go insane and I think he’s come up with something that definitely stands out from all the others, since it still looks mostly very human, with random insectoid elements. The face is amazing. He says the female aspect of the creature has a classic, Old School Pin-Up style that he thinks the judges will appreciate.

Meagan’s moth is a little rough but it sort of works. The wings – which look like Thrift Store curtains – are bad news, but the body has a distinctive moth hairiness that she was going for. She hates it and says that it looks like “Chewbaca and a moth made a baby.” Ha! Excellent.

Here come those closer looks and the judges have a lot to say about everything tonight. They like House’s attention to detail and the way Wayne’s firefly body lights up from the inside. They notice that Alam did not quite finish the back of her insect. Neville says the way the wings look makes him “want to die.”

Glenn has problems with the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle” texture of Anthony’s body sculpt. They like a lot of the shapes and textures of Eric Z’s mosquito. The also love the stylized “Action Figure” details of Kris’s Butterfly and the neat sculptural details of Autumn’s Beetle. They think that the precision on Eric F’s spider face sculpt needs to be elevated. Ve calls Meagan’s Moth creature “Pop Art,” and not in a good way. And Glenn just looks at it and says “Woof.” Because, Glenn.

Judgment Time

Meagan, Kris, Alam, Wayne and Anthony are the best and the worst tonight; everyone else is safe and can leave the stage.

Meagan is first up for the inquisition. Glenn asks her to explain her decisions and what drove her design this week. She says that she read about moths and how much hair they have, but maybe she went too crazy with the hair? Neville says it’s not the amount of fur but the colors that are “killing” it. Glenn says the wings look like she lobbed paint on them from across the room. He is disappointed. Ve says that while she incorporated blue and orange into the paint job on the wings (per her photo), other than that she did not follow any design.

Kris explains that the microscopic photo inspired the top of his Butterfly’s head, but that he just made up the design for the chest. Ve says he did a beautiful job of making it up. The colors are the same as the microscopic photo. Glenn loves it! They think he made some excellent decisions with the use of colors. High Fives all around for Kris.

Alam’s Grasshopper immediately gets an earful from Neville, who says he hates the wings, and advises that “if it you run out of time and [your sculpt] looks like Hell, don’t put it on.” He says there’s a whole bunch of stuff that destroys the design. Glenn says she did not maintain the translucency of the silicone and the colors do not flow together. Ve has no idea what she was trying to do.

For Wayne’s Firefly, Glenn says he knocked it out of the park. The movement of the mouth is so well integrated into the make up that it enhances the overall look, plus the eyes look great. Neville likes the character of the silhouette and Ve loves the color scheme and the green, glowing tail. Unfortunately, he has to admit that he neglected to incorporate the elements from the photo, which was the point of the challenge.

Anthony says his creature is an Army Ant (thus, the camouflage pants). Ve says it does not look like an Ant to her. Neville says he made a lot of ‘bizarre’ decisions. Glenn is not happy with the paint, the sculpt or the overall design. After such a great winning streak earlier in the season, the judges are surprised to see him turn in such poor work.

The Top Looks are Kris for a beautiful sculpt and gorgeous colors that made for a great, creative cohesive make up. Also, Wayne’s Firefly is absolutely amazing. Glenn loves the head in proportion to the body. Neville says putting the antennas on the cheekbones, where the model could articulate them, was a good call. Sadly, forgetting to incorporate the details from the photo will surely cost him.

On the bottom, Glenn says that Meagan is not in the place she needs to be after this many challenges. Ve says her wings looks look like ‘psychedelic vomit.’ Alam made so many bad decisions, the bunched-up wings especially. And overall, this is the worst thing Anthony has done, especially the disappointing antennae.

We already know that the Top Looks are Kris’s Butterfly and Wayne’s Firefly but, since Wayne forgot to incorporate his microscopic photo images, Kris wins by default. Kris is extremely grateful and knows Wayne would have snagged the win had the situation been different.

Who sucks and why: A textural divide between the body and the wings, plus a bad paint job, mean Meagan could go home. Anthony’s make up felt tacked-on, and they can tell he struggled with the concept. Alam made bad design choices and has poor time management skills. And…it looks like Alam is going home tonight. Not only did the judges not understand her choices, but she didn’t even understand them. Alam had some great ideas in many of the challenges – and even pulled out a win in the Candy Challenge. No doubt she’ll hone her skills and we’ll see her work in the movies.

The episode recaps of SyFy’s Face Off Season 4 were originally written for the website, Redesign Revolution. As that site has gone offline, this article has been added into the historical archive of the Worley Gig for all of our readers to enjoy.

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Official Series Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_Off_(TV_series)