Robin M. Milligan

Almost everything that could have gone wrong, did!

I felt so unprofessional, and imposter syndrome was threatening to take over my brain.

Just before the model arrived at my studio I slipped hard in the mud and had to change clothes. 😞

I kept knocking things over in my currently in progress studio, not being used to the layout yet. I even knocked over my lights, more than once.

All three of my smaller airbrushes were having trouble with the brand of body paint I used (even though I had used that same paint with those same airbrushes before without issues).

I unclogged each of them many times before the last straw…

My smaller air compressor then overheated and decided to stop working. 😱

At that point I gave up on the airbrushes for this shoot. It just wasn’t my day.

It had been 5 hours that should have been 2 or less. I was contemplating just calling it a bust.

Model Tammy () and I joked that I had more paint on me than she did. The pressure in the clog was so great at one point that I even ended up with paint on the ceiling! There was paint everywhere.

Tammy was so easy going and funny, we talked and laughed the entire time. When she saw the look on my face she knew I was considering throwing in the towel. She told me, “it would be a shame to waste the work you’ve done so far.”

I was worried that I was wasting her time, but she said she was having so much fun! So I ended up using brushes to blend in the spots that had splattered all over the already skillfully finished areas, and finished the other half of her body that had yet to be painted.

It was a fun but long and embarrassing day.

When I looked at the pictures later that night, I was glad I finished the work even though it was an entire fiasco.

Tammy shined. So beautiful, powerful, and real.

Despite the challenges of the day, the shots came out magic. The lighting was exactly as I had wanted, my hand painted background mural really shined, and although the body paint wasn’t my best work, it didn’t really matter because the pictures are stunning.

I hope you love them as much as I do.

Model

Body painting, mural, lighting, photography
By Robin Milligan