Q&A: Hollywood makeup artist Dave Snyder will lead workshops at Evansville costume shop

With Halloween approaching, local costume shop Nick Nackery is hosting a makeup workshop with an Emmy-winning makeup artist.

Dave Snyder, an Owensboro, Kentucky, native, will run the four workshops at 201 E. Virginia St. in Evansville.

"It's just a matter of finding your creativity and saying, 'What can I use that is readily available and doesn't cost me an arm and a leg to do something neat and original?" he said.

Growing up in Owensboro in the 1960s, Snyder knew he wanted more than the small city had to offer. He went to the University of Kentucky where he completed a two-year dental laboratory program. In it, he learned how to make dentures, gold crowns and other technical dental work.

But Snyder ended up working in a different field, taking a job at a local television station as a video editor, then a news photographer.

He left the Midwest in 1992 to move to California, where he's been since.

"It was finally realizing that if I don't do it now, I'm probably never going to do it and I didn't want to lose that opportunity," he said.

Snyder's three decades of work include "Pam & Tommy," "Prey," "Star Trek," "Birds of Prey," "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," "The Cabin in the Woods," "Insidious 2" and more.

Snyder's four workshops will take place upstairs at Nick Nackery on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1 at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Each class will last two hours and include a 20-minute question-and-answer session with Snyder.

Tickets are $25 and can be purchased online through Eventbrite or at Nick Nackery. Snyder will demonstrate techniques and tricks he has learned in his career with products from Nick Nackery and some of his personal favorites.

"It just goes to demonstrate what you can do locally. You don't have to live in Los Angeles or New York to create something super cool for Halloween," Snyder said.

The Courier & Press spoke with Snyder to learn more about his career and the upcoming workshops.

What was your career like when you first started?

My very first job was "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," not the TV series but the movie. I was hired to sculpt forehead appliances, pointed ears, and vampire teeth for the vampires. That was my first gig, working in the makeup effects shop for Todd Masters's company. He was the first guy to have to hire me and is still a good friend to this day. And from there, I just worked at various different shops.

The way it generally works is you start finding jobs through word of mouth, by people that you've worked with, and someone might give them a call and say, "'"Hey, are you available for a job?" And if they're busy, they might throw your name out and say, "Well, try this guy." So then that just kind of blossoms into a network of people and you just kind of continue on from there.

What are some of your favorite projects that you've worked on?

Sometimes the favorite jobs aren't necessarily good movies and, sometimes, the good movies aren't necessarily your favorite jobs.

Probably one of the most fun shows I ever did was a movie called "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," which was Sean Connery's last movie. And we shot that in Prague in the Czech Republic. It was just a great time. It was a wonderful place to be on location for months on end, very good crew and fun work. But the movie itself is, you know, not the best. But that was probably one of the most fun.

I also did a TV show for three seasons in Georgia called "Stan Against Evil," which is like a horror comedy and that was a lot of fun because I had so much creative input. Sometimes, producers and directors want to hear your opinion on things and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have their own vision, and they just want you to do the work and shut up. And other times they want to hear they want to see what you can bring to the table and "Stan Against Evil" was extremely creatively fulfilling in that way.

What made you want to become a makeup artist?

When I was a teenager, the original "Star Wars" came out in 1977, and that movie was absolutely groundbreaking in a lot of ways, but especially in its visuals. And I saw that, and originally I thought, well, I want to do the type of special effects that involve spaceships and miniatures and different things and decided to play around a little bit with that as a hobby, and then it eventually kind of narrowed itself down into what I really liked were creatures and the odd kind of things like that.

Then in the early 80s, a series of movies came out like "The Howling," "Altered States" and "American Werewolf in London," where there was a new type of makeup that literally changed on camera. You would see people's faces distort and change and claws grow out of hands. And it was all on camera. None of this was digital. No, this was computerized and I was fascinated by that and I wanted to figure out how they did it.

And then I thought, "Wow, what a cool job it would be to do that every day, (to) go into work and turn somebody into a werewolf."

I started looking everywhere I could find information and this was all obviously pre-internet. So it was like, if you could find a book or a magazine, you just followed it up as best you could, and you buy some materials and start experimenting to see what you can come up with. Ultimately, that's what led me to take the dental laboratory course − it taught me a lot about various materials and processes, mold making and stuff like that. And I thought, well, if I can't get into makeup, then this is my fallback. I can always make teeth and dentures and make a good living doing them.

It was the movies in the early 80s. That really kind of sealed the deal for what I want to do with my life.

How has the art of makeup artistry changed since you started your career? How are you evolving with each change?

It was already changing to an extent by the time I got into the business in 1992 because computers were starting to pop up. Nowadays, a lot of what we use to build practically, whether it is a monster puppet, an animatronic type of thing, or a person in a suit, a lot of that's done digitally now.

So a lot of work actually started to go away as soon as I got in the business. I don't think makeup in itself will ever go away, not as long as we still have actors. But a lot of the more special effects-type makeup has almost ceased to exist because producers find it cheaper to do via computer via digital effects.

It can be tricky to evolve because so much has been done in the prosthetic world. And it's very challenging to come up with something brand new and original, though that's what you always strive for. Keeping up with new materials, staying at the drawing board, and learning how to deal with different types of personalities help the challenge.

Do you have anyone that inspired you?

There was a very well-known makeup artist named Dick Smith, who did "The Godfather," "The Exorcist," and a lot of those classic movies. In the mid-80s, when I was still going to school for dental laboratory technology, he started to offer a course which I was fortunate enough to get accepted into. I was able to take his course and be tutored by him without ever really having the opportunity to work under him directly. But he would be the closest I have to a mentor.

But I also admired the work of Rick Baker and a lot of the 80s effects artists who came up with some mind-blowing images. And especially when you look at them now and you realize it was all done practically as somebody built it by hand as opposed to designing it and rendering it on a computer.

What advice do you have for anyone getting into this field?

Practice. It's much easier to find information on how to do things than it was in my day. You can go to YouTube, and there are a million tutorials, some are good, some are bad. But practice, practice, practice.

If you want to do makeup, then do makeup. You can start off pretty inexpensively in terms of what you have to buy to get going. And just practice, that's what makes you good. Some people are better natural artists than others but everyone's skill increases with practice. Emulate the work of others that you've seen and that you really admire to test yourself and see how well can I do something along these lines.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Dave Snyder to lead Halloween makeup workshop at Nick Nackery in Evansville