Gruesome Game of Thrones Makeup Tutorial

Tools and materials: 

• Scar wax
• Knitting needle
• Setting powder
• Eyeshadow (skin-colored, red, gray, and black)
• Makeup brush

1. Apply scar wax

First, take some scar wax and use this to create the texture of your scales. Take a big chunk of it and spread it out over the areas where you want to create your greyscale.

Do be sure to spread it so that it blends out a little bit but also try to maintain some thicker parts because that is going to give the scaly texture later on.

Don't worry about making the wax perfectly smooth as we anyway want our scales to have some texture and dimension to them.

2. Draw on the scales

Next, take an object that you’re going to use to draw in your scales. I'm using a thin knitting needle here, but you can use a pencil or a pen or something else.

Scratch into the wax and create little scales. Wiping the needle on some tissue paper after drawing each scale to remove the excess wax. I'm making some larger scales and some smaller ones everywhere where I have the wax.

3. Apply powder

Next, take some loose powder, I have some which is slightly yellowy and pat it on top of the wax. This is going to help make a base for the colored eyeshadows later on. It just helps make the wax a little bit less sticky.

4. Color the scales

Then it is time to start working on the coloring. Start with a red eye shadow and apply it all around the edges of the wax. This will create an irritated skin effect.

I'm going for a little bit of a later stage greyscale and later stage greyscale definitely has a lot of redness around the skin. So, I'm creating a redness all around and then in any of the larger cracks that I have in between my scales. I'm also going to apply some red eye shadow.

Next, go in with a skin-colored eyeshadow and apply it all around the edges of your greyscale.

Greyscale typically tends to be darker towards the center and then gets lighter as it spreads outwards.

I'm doing everything in powder from now on because cream can blur the scale lines and just doesn't work that well. Later on, I decided to go over everything with the skin color to have an even base.

Finally, go in with some gray. I'm using a brownish taupe color first and again I'm going to work from light to dark so I'm applying a lighter color kind of more on the outside.

Then I'm going to go in with a darker gray and this time I'm going to try and stay away from the edges and just fill in the larger, more centered scales.

5. Color between the cracks

Now it's time to take a black eyeshadow and an eyeliner brush. Use it to color in between the cracks to make them look deeper and to accentuate the scales a little bit better.

Once done, go over everything with a fluffy eyeshadow brush. This helps the makeup look more natural and helps to blend the edges a little bit.

6. Deepen the cracks

Lastly, with a small eyeshadow brush and a little bit of black eyeshadow deepen some of the oldest and most advanced scales of greyscale and make them a little bit darker.

Then use the back of your brush to push in the center of the scales. If you look closely at photos of greyscale from Game of Thrones, you can see that often the center is kind of dented in.

Game of Thrones makeup

Here we have the finished greyscale makeup look for Halloween.

I think that it looks very realistic and gory, and I feel just like a character in Game of Thrones. If you’re a Game of Thrones fan like me, I’m sure you love the look!