Andrea Reed is a makeup artist, photographer, and model from Victoria, BC, Canada, who goes by the name girlgreybeauty on Instagram. With over 900 posts on the account, this has brought her nearly 300,000 followers with some of her photos racking upwards of 80,000 likes.
Besides this, she also does pet portrait commissions and other kinds of art on her other account. The account is mostly populated with adorable cats and dogs, but she showcases other spectacular forms of art, whether it’s paintings or crafts.
To Andrea, art and makeup were always a huge fancy for her, which led to her merging the two together.
“I have always loved to do art and have a love for makeup as well and wanted to combine the two together,” elaborated Reed.
“With the lips being a smaller and more challenging canvas, I wanted to give it a try! And people seemed to really love the lip art, so I stuck with it. I also was very inspired by the artists @missjazminad and @depechegurl on Instagram. They were some of the first lip artists back when I started in 2014.”
While her Instagram’s last posts are from two years ago, this doesn’t mean that Reed stopped practicing art—she simply switched to other forms, as she explains:
“For the past 2 years, I have not been doing much makeup art, but lately I have been focusing more on traditional art and mediums over at @andreareedart. I absolutely adore animals, so I have been enjoying painting animal portraits.”
“I usually plan my designs out by drawing them on paper first. Then I get my supplies and equipment ready. Camera, lights, etc. are set up,” Reed explained how she does lip art.
“The application usually takes about one hour, photography can take anywhere between 15 minutes to 1 hour. And then retouching the photo and post production can take anywhere from 1 to 4 hours, depending on the condition of my skin at the time. Altogether, one lip art photo will usually take 3–6 hours.”
Given the relatively small area of the lips, you bet it’s not that easy to use it as a canvas. It’s something Reed points out as being one of the biggest challenges in the art, among other things:
“The lips are a very small area to work and not a perfectly smooth canvas. Another challenge is that while I do lip art, I try not to close my lips together at all, smile, laugh, talk or anything!”