Hi I'm Michelle Hogue, founder of MAGDolls FX.
I have always had a passion for gore/horror movies! I remember being a little girl going to the video rental store, I think it was called "Video Madness", back when you could rent movies.
I would look for the goriest covers, have a sleep over, and feel horribly disappointed for the lack of gore. I'm sure my friends parents appreciated this, especially being in Utah at the time.
I also love, love, love, haunted houses. My friends and I would try to come up with something cool to do every year for halloween. We would even make our own haunted cassettes off my keyboard to play in the garage for the trick or treaters. Halloween still is my favorite holiday because you can be anything you want to be!
As an adult in 2001, I attended beauty college In Ogden UT at "Stacy's Hands Of Champions." I love saying that name.
I graduated in Aug 2002 and did hair in UT for a few years with the goal of eventually moving to Chicago, my New York. I love doing hair and makeup. There's something about making people feel awesome about themselves, It's the best feeling.
Eventually my husband Gary and I moved to Portland Oregon so he could attend art school and study animation. He liked the animation course in Portland better than Chi, so Oregon won! I will be traveling back and forth between the two for vacations some day.
I started getting into gore makeup. I watched videos online of how to do cool makeup effects so I could be zombified for Halloween. Then I eventually learned about Portland's Zombie walk. I wanted to participate, so I would zombify myself and zombify my friends so they could play too. I opened up a small hair parlour "MAGDolls" in 2009. This is where I practice making people look and feel fabulous! I recently started trying to make prosthetic pieces to wear for Halloween in 2011. I was using my glass head as a model. Gary suggested I used clay to make exaggerated facial features. My project went from an eye piece to a whole face piece!
I thought, how fun, I wanna make zombie doll heads and sell them on Etsy because they're so cute and everyone should have one! Then I started seeing all these tv shows pop up like "Making Monsters", "Face Off", and "Monster Man." I thought how F@#%ing RAD! I wanna do this for a living too! I told some of my hair buddies about this idea and caught the attention of one of my bffs, Richard Quetives. We were out having some beers when he brought up my plan and said he'd be down to play with some mold making and life casting etc... I said "Ok lets do this maaaan!" This has brought us into the life casting world.
I had already started learning all I could by stalking the internet and finding other sources to learn from. I shared all my info with Richard and we turned our loft into a work space for "MAGDolls FX."
It is the greatest reward to see people stare and take pictures of something that you've created. We love having the ability to make a perfect prosthetic mask or body piece for people that want something bad ass to wear to their costume parties or wherever.
In order to make a customized piece that fits to one particular person, it all starts with a life cast. The pieces we get from these casts alone are amazing with all the details they pick up. Transforming them into something sweet and or nasty is just an added benefit. Our business is all about transformation and change.