Section: Fan Photos & Galleries

Moon Kana is a Japanese rock singer, toy designer, illustrator, and a fashion designer. She’s also a gothic/lolita model and loves Lip Service. Here’s a video she sent wishing us a Happy 25th Anniversary! Thanks, Moon Kana!

We love getting photos of Lippy Fans from around the world, so we were thrilled to get this recap from Batsday Aventure @ Disneyland from Rebecca (Sage Sin)  – and tons of great photos! Thanks, Rebecca!

“It was a bright and sunny day for such a gloom and doom event. “The largest dark alternative subculture gathering at Disneyland” was about to take place – Batsday. Started in 1999, Batsday is an annual event that is filled with lots of ghoulish fun. The birds and the bats were all out today. Walking into the park you could definitely feel the presence.  Black overcoats, mini top hats, and of course giant 6″ plus boots spread as far as the eye could see. Here all are welcome to the happiest place on Earth.

Batsday in the Fun Park starts off every year, or at least since the 5 years I’ve been going, with the 12:00 o’clock meeting spot in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.  May 2^nd 2010 was no different. This is always a spectacle as you can imagine  one of those extended photos of  a sea of black with some red, purple, green, etc. popping out here and there, and about 100 plus umbrellas. It used to be held annually in August, but after many a burnt goth, they moved it to May.  I sadly arrived late and missed the castle meeting spot,  but from my experiences from years past I knew it was a glorious gathering of all sorts of alternative subcultures, all creative and unique in their own way. There’s everything from cyber kids, to romantic goths, to steampunk, deathrock, shockrock, glam rock, pyschobilly, Lolita, Victorian, black metal, metalheads, hearse societies, industrial, EBM,  you name it. Everyone  is certainly dressed to impress. It even gathers regular tourists snapping photos in awe. It definitely kicks the day off to a spooktacular start!  After that there’s a meet for parents and their “baby bats,” -  13 and younger, at the Sword in the Stone next to the Carousel in Fantasyland. Keep in mind all meetings are optional. Most of the fun is enjoying your day passing and mingling with your fellow Batsday attendees while you try and fill in the rest of the “Norms” (the regular Disneyland day goers), that Disneyland isn’t hosting some sort of gothic convention!. The final and most important of meetings is the 8 o’clock Haunted Mansion gathering. Here all the Batsday ghouls and gals gather in line to get a total head count, some years totaling close to 3000! This year, we only made 1066. The haunted Mansion doesn’t always include all and the entire attendee totals are impossible to know exactly, but some years have estimated 3000-5000, and 2 years ago was their 10^th anniversary. No matter the number, it’s still such a moment,  surrounded by so many people who are so familiar with everything you are. To be part of this group that all share such a common feeling and passion for this alternative scene spreads such static through the air. Sometimes if you listen closely you can even hear, “Marco…Polo…Goth out of water!” After a few quick shots of your group you head in to the haunted mansion where everyone knows every line to the ride adding a wonderful eerie effect. It’s the perfect way to start closing out the night.  Slowly people clear out of the park, some people have changed to save their poor feet, like myself, while others are brave and stick it out to the end. The park gets thinner and thinner while last minute photos are taken with a continued theme of admiration. Nothing is worse than the walk back to the car, back to normal day life, away from the dark fairyland. Only to plan for next year’s outfit!

It’s funny how easy you became so accustomed to these events year after year and with everything around you, you become part of it and you just fall in love. Looking back through past pictures you see a lot of familiar faces and it sort of becomes a family. A nice little dark once a year family…with Mickey Mouse.

Well, hopefully everyone got some Lippy gear from me if you went – Lip Service Flyers, stickers, key chains, and more! Thanks for everyone that has a great attitude every year and keeps it friendly and high spirited! I’ve noticed that its gotten a little less friendly year by year,  till I realized we’re all sort of standoffish from strangers, until you say “Happy Batsday” or give someone a big smile, then people are definitely more friendly and open =]

Huge thanks to Lip Service and all their support, and thanks to everyone supporting Lip Service!

See you guys next year.

God bless the freaks!

Sage Sin

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http://batsday.net/

Just a typical customer shopping for vinyl….

Note from the webmistress: Have I mentioned that we LOVE getting new, hot photos of you in your Lip Service gear? Yeah, thought so.

So, of course, I was tickled as hell to see this yummy pic in the new posts for the update this week. Sadly, Lily Darko, the sexy beast who shared this photo, didn’t share any more about herself so we could give her proper love and adulation. Lily, if you want to tell us more about you, please email me or pop some stuff in the comments.

A note from the webmistress: We LOVE it when you all send in photos of yourself rocking Lip Service gear! We just about danced with glee at the awesomeness of these photos shared with us by the always-gorgeous Andromeda X (who you might remember from some of our earlier photo contests). I’d have compiled them into a gallery but, honestly, it would be a crime to not show every one of these photos in their splendid full-sized glory. ENJOY!

When I see a really intriguing artist in the course of my web travels, my first thought is, “I must share this cool shit with everyone!” Well, when someone as talented as Jim Wayer (aka Wicked Illusions) falls right into my lap while I’m editing the webzine, that goes double!

You’ve seen Jim’s beautiful images in Nos’ Devil Inside features. From the pretty portraits to the dark undertones of the Used and Abused set and the creepy camp of the Transformation set that turned Nos into a hot, fur-encased werewolf, he has been a perfect visual foil for our resident gore whore’s thoughts. Once I started looking further into his work, I found not only some awesome creepiness, but also a selection of purely sexy imagery and portraits with personality and (refreshingly) just a bit of a whimsical eye. Below is a gallery with a taste of Jim’s Wicked Illusions. Visit his website WickedIllusions.com to see more and get information on how to book him (or click the logo).

A little background on Jim (from his website bio):
Wicked Illusions (a.k.a. Jim Wayer) is an award winning film maker who has taken his love for the visual dynamic into the realm of photography. A fairly new comer to the photography scene, he has already had his work published in Bizarre Magazine and Zivity, as well as here on the Lip Service webzine, and has been gaining the attention of many in the Alt/Fetish realm (which is where he feels the most at home).

Nothing shall stop him from bettering himself as an artist and experimenting into higher levels of insanity. So join his demented band of freaks or prepare yourself for battle! He also loves little puppies.

 

 
I had a chance to ask Jim a few questions and here’s what he had to say for himself …

Webmistress: How did you start getting interested in photography and who were your influences? I could ask the same about horror … and will … why dark themes and who influenced your style?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: Well my love for photography really spawned from my love of lighting. It all began with becoming a film maker and realizing how the lighting actually affected the mood that you felt when viewing the imagery. My main influences are filmmakers that expand the visual means of their films, which also is a reason I am attracted to horror, because you see this all the time in the genre. You get such beautiful imagery in films like Susperia and The Beyond, that you just don’t see in films like Big Momma’s House. Also, one of the many hats I wear is that of a Special FX artist, so I have a deep-rooted history and love with all things gory and scary!

 
WM: If you had to describe your work in a sentence or less, what would it be?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: The dark, sadistic side of beauty

 

WM: What is your process in creating images and where is the most crazy place you’ve gotten inspiration for a shoot?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: I have multiple processes for creating images. Sometimes, I know exactly what I want and spend hours of adjusting to capture that. Sometimes I have a broad idea of the feel that I want to go for, but let the shoot take on its own life. It’s very enjoyable for me when a shoot takes a turn that I didn’t expect and achieves a greater result! I get very bizarre inspirations from strange places. I tend to see the truths behind many things more than their face value. I see a flyer for a church picnic and what I see is a good marketing idea for the church to make some money. One of the recent bizarre inspirations came from seeing somebody drinking a tropical drink out of a coconut. Still have not planned that one out yet, but it’s coming!

 
WM: So, how dark are the recesses of your mind?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: Ha! I don’t know what you mean! The recesses of my mind are like bluebirds flying around in an open field…just sometimes they happen to land on a landmine.

 
WM: What would be a subject or scene you would not do, no matter what?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: I cannot say that there is a specific scene or image that I absolutely won’t do. There are certain subjects that I would never show in a certain light. For example, I would never show a child mutilated or abused simply to be shocking, however, if should that image was more about portraying the evilness of the person inflicting such pain on the kid, then I would be ok with it (of course all implied and not actually hurting a kid!).

One of the more horrifying subjects that I see is that of animal abuse and torture. I am a huge dog lover and seeing such subject matter always pisses me off. However, I also push myself in that way too. If I come across something that frightens me, I confront it and overcome my fear of it. Sometimes the way to overcome a fear of heights is to simply stand on a ledge 5 stories in the air. So there isn’t anything that I would absolutely never show, because I think all taboo subject matter can be shown in certain aspects, where it actually conveys an appropriate message.

 

WM: What is the most challenging subject you’ve done so far?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: The most challenging subject that I have come across is having to shoot sets that are, as I call them, “Normal photos”. I like shooting fashion photos, as long as I can have my visual feel to it. There are many places that I have come across that immediately dismiss photos because, god forbid, there are shadows!

I don’t care too much for the photos that are all soft and flat. I have a recent love for soft light, but still want to create a more three dimensional feel to a photo in regards of the subject and the scene around them.

 
WM: If logistics and budget were no object, what would your Holy Grail photo shoot be?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: Well, equipment wise, I’d have about three 27’ grip trucks packed to the brim. However, location wise, I would love to have free run of an abandoned, underground military base. I also would love to recreate the test towns that the government set up for nuclear bomb tests and have a whole mess of models, dressed up, and charred, posing as the mannequins.

 
WM: On a similar vein, if you could do a portrait of anyone, who would it be and how would you present them?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: It would definitely be Masuimi Max. She has a look that would make a priest have to say 10 Hail Mary’s! I would either present her in a 70’s exploitation style battered victim way, or as a deranged psychopath. Seeing her in a ripped up straightjacket, splattered with blood and holding some form of blunt object.

 
WM: Beside photography, what are your creative passions?

WICKED ILLUSIONS: The two main artistic releases I have besides photography would be web/graphic design and film making. I find a strange pleasure in typing like a madman in this bizarre coding language and having it turn out all pretty like! A few recent examples of this are My Website, and the new Wicked Pixel Cinema webstore.

On the filmmaking front, I love being on set and simply being a part of such magnificent display of organized chaos! My first major film that I ever worked on was DEADWOOD PARK, where I was Key Grip. That movie also sucked me into joining Wicked Pixel Cinema. That’s when I declared that no matter what, I will be an artist for the rest of my life. Since then I wore many hats through the insane production of Eric Stanze’s current movie RATLINE and manage day to day operations at our studio. I also am happy to say that in two days I leave for New York to work in the Grip/Electric department on Jim Mickle’s film STAKE LAND!

Photo/credit information is as follows:

row 1 (left to right): “Used and Abused”  / Model: Nos; “Ugly America” (Merch Shot for Ugly Shyla’s T-Shirt)”  / Model: Nos; “Eating Pussy” (Original title) aka “Sweet Kitty” (Censored title)  /  Model: Nos; “Shut up and Listen!”  /  Model: Pandora Genocide

row 2 (left to right): “Sexy Domestic (Zivity Set Preview)”  /  Model: Pandora Genocide; “Infidelity”  /  Model: Pandora Genocide; “Gossip”  /  Model: Pandora Genocide; “Ghostly Seduction”  /  Model: Pandora Genocide

row 3 (left to right): “Flesheater”  /  Model: Pandora Genocide; portrait of filmmaker Eric Stanze of Wicked Pixel Cinema; “Elegant”  /  Model: Nos; “BUBBLE (Zivity Set Preview)” / Model: Kaila Marie

row 4 (left to right): “Breezy and Beautiful”  /  Model: Nos; “Vintage Beard”  /  Model: Jason Christ; Voyeur’s Delight”  /  Model: Sarah Swofford; Merch shot for Wicked Pixel Cinema’s Logo T-Shirt  /  Model: Pandora Genocide

I’m a mother of two from the UK, and I am a Lippy Addict and proud to be one. I was however slightly disgusted when some freakin’ idiot suggested that my daughter was a ‘poor baby’ because she was photographed with me wearing Lip Service in a pic which I put on the Lippy group on Facebook.

Surely we are in a place in the universe now where you can wear what the heck you like! It’s pathetic really. There are plenty of Mums on the lippy_addicts board. It’s not like I was standing holding my daughter in a gimp suit I was wearing a GP top!

I even dress my daughter in some DIY Lippy and she looks absolutely adorable in it. I like that we can match sometime, although I know people will probably find it a bit creepy!!

Every so often, The WebMaster and I check out DeviantArt, one of the best places to check out some of the finest established and up-and-coming artists, to see what they’re doing with Lip Service. Here are some of the shots we found. Just click the photos to visit the full-sized image in the artsts’ portfolio.

There is little we love more than beautifully executed photography. When the artist masters the subject, composition, lighting, mood, and all the little nuanced intangibles, there’s a wonderful magic in it. This is why we occasionally shine a spotlight on emerging artists whose work we love and want to share with everyone.

You may remember Saida Inkeri’s work from our photo contests, back in the day. Her eye for a great photo stood out then, with great shots like her self-portrait in Teach Hit Me with a Ruler. Her post work in photoshop was also apparent, especially in her Summer submission. We’ve kept an eye out for her and are so glad we did. Her recent work shows a fatastic gift for visual storytelling, with exceptional beauty.

When I asked Inkeri whether she would like to be featured here, she sent me an in-depth and lovely letter about her photography, inspirations, and thoughts about the process of creativity. It really would be a crime to edit it down, so I am keeping the whole thing intact for everyone to appreciate the thought that goes into her process.

You can view more of Inkeri’s work on her pages at DeviantArt and Model Mayhem.

I’m from a small town in northern Finland. I’ve always wanted to work in some creative field. When I was small I wanted to be a dancer, a ballerina, and did go to ballet lessons for a while, but I guess it never took off (My sister got more into dancing and things, she’s now an aerial acrobat. I suppose the artist’s life runs in the family or something.). Later on I wanted to be a writer, a comic book artist, an actor, director, the list goes on.

I arrived at photography by accident, I guess, since I was never really that good at drawing and photography felt deceivingly easy compared to that, though it really isn’t. I photographed nature a lot at first, nature is always at hand and I just wanted something to do. Finland is a pretty good place to start, the seasons are very varied here so there’s a lot to photograph. Eventually I started liking photography more and more and went to a kind of a community college/vocational school/trade school. I graduated from there about a year ago and, now, am starting at the University of Applied Sciences, focusing on becoming a producer.

As for photography, I like symbolism a lot in mine. I like to photograph secret or surprising things that might not be immediately obvious to the casual observer. Photography is often either about showing something others might not have seen or preserving something you feel is precious to you or somebody else. Today’s digital photography has changed that a bit; you can preserve almost any moment, no matter how insignificant and it is a bit of a challenge to try to make your photograph special in that atmosphere. I’ve tried to be more subtle, not so ambitious, and just want to photograph things I feel are just pretty or nice.

Small moments.

I like details and macro shots a lot, textures like wood or peeled of paint, and have a huge love for abandoned houses, factories etc, and the same idea in nature, places where you can feel that nobody has been here for ages. It feels like time has stopped and like maybe you can sort of look into some other era. In nature, I like how it’s sort of eternal, it’s always been here and it goes on despite what people do. In abandoned houses, I’m fascinated not only by natural light and textures (which both are awesome and often unique) but also by why people left and what they left behind. Did something of them stay behind? I’d like to explore that in photos even more that I’ve done now, the feeling of peeking, almost without permission, inside somebody else’s old life.

But, then again, I’m kind of superficial. I really love fashion and clothes, so I obviously love photographing them, too. I feel there are a lot of contraries; I like the gentle, subtle, organic feel of nature, but also simply love pretty, artificial things like lace and frills and shiny things. I want to photograph people wearing lovely clothes. I chose a lot of fashion/glamour photos for this article, because I felt those would be what Lip Service Webzine readers might be interested in the most. I tried to but in some nature photography, but I don’t feel they work well in the same context. Nature has a completely different feeling.

I style my photos and my models myself and want to mix different styles, but mostly am in what you’d call gothic style. I’m kind of against considering gothic clothing as a fetish, just like I’m against considering models just being sexy or items for fantasies. I don’t think everything is about sex. I’d like to show people being beautiful and incredible without the idea that they’re just posing to be sexy. I’m very much a feminist, which might sound like a contradiction because I often like to photograph others as well as myself in revealing clothing. I just would like to challenge the idea that women are pretty just to please men or that they pose just to be objects. My ‘models’ are usually my friends or acquantainces and, while they’re all gorgeous, they’re not supermodels. And I don’t want them to be, I truly believe everybody can be beautiful and make a beautiful picture. That being said, I would like to someday work with professional models too, to see what somebody who’s trained in being in front of camera would react and how they’d work the photograph.

I also like to do self-portraits a lot. Sometimes I feel self-conscious about it, in our culture it’s considered very narcissistic to do that. I’ve always had problems with the way I look, I’ve never liked it and have considered myself to be down right ugly and disgusting. I guess self-portraits came from a place where I wanted to look pretty and grew more into this exploration of how I want to see myself. In self-potraits I can choose who I am, can control myself. Of course people seeing the picture will think what they think, but I still give them the tools. I decide what I want them to see and what I don’t. I read about a Finnish photographer called Miina Savolainen who had a project with girls from an orphanage, where she took pictures of them to focus their feelings of self-worth and love, to give them an opportunity to be photographed as who they wanted to be and not just orphans from bad homes and bad situations (Note from WebMistress: You can read about this wonderful project at THE LOVELIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD –PHOTOGRAPHY PROJECT). Her idea felt really close to how I feel about self-portraits. It’s like I can re-create myself in my own photos, be who I am or who I want to be without fearing what others think, because in the moment of taking the picture, I’m the only there. Most of them are pretty intimate and often have some kind of secrets with myself, like some things that only mean something to me.

All in all, I like hiding small things in my photos sometimes, like puzzles.

I use a lot of photoshop, which is another thing I’m often kind of torn about. I love to bring something fantastic or dreamlike to photos, something unreal. But then again, it’s very slippery slope to start fixing people and make them look unreal too. I’m definitely against creating unreal expectations of what people should look like. Of course everybody wants to look nice, everybody wants to look their best, is it okay to fix a few zits? Take out a few pounds? It’s a very thin line.

There’s still a lot I need and want to learn about photography. Maybe in the future I will focus on studying it more, or maybe find some kind of mentorship or intership somewhere that could help me out. At this point, I’m still mostly doing it because I enjoy it. One day I hope I can make it more meaningful.

~ Inkeri

You can’t get much more dedicated than getting an awesome dagger tat! Check out the new ink that Dirty Diana in Nürmberg, Germany got on her arm. Diana, you are a hardcore Lippy addict! You rock!

Check out her Myspace page:
www.myspace.com/sweet667

Do you have a Lip Service themed tattoo? Maybe you have a dagger emblazoned on your laptop skin, modded clothes, car, wherever? Well, we would love to see it.

Send photos or video of your Lippy pride to the editor or submit them through the site.

Then we’ll be writing about how fucking awesome you are!