Meet Ashleigh Doucette | Makeup & Special Effects Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ashleigh Doucette and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ashleigh, how do you think about risk?
Taking risks has always been part of who I am. I am a fairly impulsive and impatient person so if I want something or if I am thinking about doing something I will often just jump the gun and go for it. This is not necessarily my best trait to be honest. It has gotten me into some situations that absolutely could have been avoided, but it has also led me to some of the most fun and rewarding experiences in my life – like spending 7 months in Australia and South East Asia in University and coming back 2 days before I had to start classes again.

I finally decided to pursue my dream career later then most people – due to many people constantly telling me it wasn’t an option, but I left an industry I had stability and money coming in to pay the bills because I wasn’t happy and I knew what I wanted. That meant i lost a few things, some friendships, a long term relationship and a sense of security for a time being… but me being on set is where I am at my best. I may be tired, cold and sometimes grumpy because the coffee is bad and we are on hour 16 but I wouldn’t want to do anything else with my life.

I learn a lot by taking risks or trying something I don’t exactly know how to do. I am quite handy – i can use power tools and fix things and work on my car ect – so I find that helps me with figuring out how to do something on set, like a blood rig or exploding a head on a budget, so i find myself getting calls for things like that where they don’t have the budget to hire a huge Pyro team, which is understandably very expensive, and want to know if I can figure out a way to do it without explosives at a lesser cost.

Professionally I am a little more cautious in my approach because I have seen and worked with those who over promise and under deliver and it just takes so much time and is so frustrating for everyone when someone has given a timeline, promise ect that just cannot be met. I will still take a risk and go for something that I haven’t done or tried before but I will set realistic expectations as in ‘this is what I know I can do, this is what we might be able to do and then this is not possible within these parameters’. I more often then not spend time on my own testing, building and paying with things to make sure the set days run smoothly… and if you ask a few of the Diretors, DP’s or even some of my crew I work with often I usually come through faster then even I think I can.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
Sometimes taking steps forward feels like taking a huge leap back. I felt like a failure starting over in my late 20’s when everyone around me was building their careers with promotions and benefits packages, or starting families ect. and I was going back to school to work in movies. It felt like I was so far behind, but I really do think having a bit more life experience gave me something a lot of newer artists to the industry don’t have which is perspective and drive. I knew what I wanted, I knew this was for me, even though it sucked going back to being a ‘starving artist’ its what i had wanted since i was a kid.

I have always been the weird artsy, spooky (emo lol) kid – I painted, draw, made jewellery, built things ect. My birthday is Halloween so that I guess predisposed me to be interested in the horror, gore, scary and macabre things in life. I always had the huge birthday with costumes where my mom would blindfold us and make us touch bowls of ‘eyeballs’ ‘ brains’ and ‘guts’ and all of these other fun spooky things. Growing up I always wanted to watch the horror movies and read the scary novels. It started with things like ‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Are You Afraid Of The Dark?’ and then a bit later I would go to blockbuster and get the scariest movie I would when my parents allowed me to even though they never wanted to watch with me. This built my love of horror makeup and the world of special/practical effects.

Once in probably grade 5-7 I was called down on Halloween to the principals office because I had been a ‘dead cheerleader’ or something, I was always the dead version of something… part of that was me paying with liquid latex and blood and making my skin dead and ‘falling off’. Well apparently this was freaking out students so I was told I wasn’t allowed to be as creepy or gross again, maybe it was the fact that I was pulling skin of randomly all day, who knows…. but this made me want to do it more and more.

I didn’t go into Makeup/Special effects like I wanted to initially. I got dragged into that ‘You have to go to University’ rhetoric of my parents generation and did that. I have a Bachelors in Fine Arts with a ‘New Media’ specialization. Essentially it means they taught me a lot of random things that didn’t fit anywhere else like programming basics, some electronics and circuit building, a bunch of digital composition and editing… and a whole bunch more. It isn’t completely a waste since the building and coding parts of the program can come in handy and obviously the art history and theory classes are helpful as well. I definitely wasted some years in that program and then afterwards looking for something that fit for me… turns out it didn’t fit me at all so I decided I had enough of just doing a job and wanted to go for what I love…. film!

I guess all of that is to say that you can change your mind, you can explore other paths and then find your way back to what makes you happiest. Making monsters, making movies, making things pretty and bloody is what I wanted to do at my core as a kid and I finally took the leap and made it happen! Taking the risk with a stable life to spend thousands on training for a new career is the hardest thing I had to do, and I have had to sacrifice a lot of the comfort and stability I did have to make it work but I really really wouldn’t want to be working in anything else.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Oh no… Knowing this is an LA thing defiantly puts me at a disadvantage being Canadian and all since I guess you itend for this to be my favourite spots there. I haven’t actually been to L.A…. I know don’t be mad! So I would be hitting up a few people I know who live in LA or surrounding areas and letting them be my guide. I have a lot to explore!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I really think that the only person who constantly supported me and made me feel like I could work in the creative field, that I could do makeup/special effects as a job and a career is my mother. So often people hear what I do and think of it a frivolous or unnecessary. The amount of people who would talk me down from wanting to move forward with this path when I was younger, who drastically delayed my eventual path was a lot, Family, friends and even romantic partners were all fairly unsupportive of me at first, until I started working and they could see i actually genuinely loved being on set.

Now I have met a little family of people who love working together and try to bring everyone onto our projects. We support each other, let each other vent about whats going wrong or talk about how we could do things better. I found my people in the industry who are ore then just co-workers and colleagues but people who genuinely share the same passions and drive as I do. We always push each other and stand up for each other… its a really weird feeling when what you all are complaining about from work is how we weren’t given the time/budget/flexibility to make something BETTER. It’s great that these people have become more then just work friends and they are people in my everyday life who support me and make sure I know that my brain is lying when it tells me that I am untalented or an imposter… and will hang out and just eat garbage food and watch bad movies/tv

Instagram: www.instagram.com/makeupbyashleighblair

Image Credits
Patrick Hodgson, Tara Winterfield, David L Eyes