MAKEUP ARTIST WILL DECORATE YOUR FILM >>>

Tacoma's freelance makeup artist Kari Baumann has her own business, and she calls it Decorate Your Face. I hear that name and immediately a mental movie begins playing of Baumann gleefully chucking handfuls of foundation and glitter (glitter?) at her clients' cheeks, with all the expressionistic exuberance of Jackson Pollock. Don't ask me why.

But Baumann's real-life work, though more subtle than this fantasy, functions equally effective. Since establishing her trade in 2005, local movie productions have mainly called upon Baumann's talents in decorating actors' faces in more naturalistic ways. Yet sometimes the end product can still shock, as it does in director Ron Lagman's short Tapat Sa Pangako (Committed) (which premiered in Tacoma last month and played this past weekend at Seattle's Post Alley Film Festival). Viewers won't easily shake off one of the movie's most striking images: the near-black bruises running across an abused woman's back, which Baumann created.

Baumann has already spent several months on the set of Rose Colored Shades, the debut feature-length drama from filmmaker Randy Sparks. The perk she revels in as a crew member is getting special access to places and spaces (and of course faces) she would never see in other lines of work. She says she loves to visit "all these cool behind-the-scenes locations that you were always curious about, like ‘What's behind that door?'"

Baumann may not have found treasure or even a good old-fashioned monster behind any of those doors she opened, but she's stumbled upon something better: "endless opportunities...(for) using a found space and creating another environment for it, and that's fascinating to me."

Find out more about Baumann on www.decorateyourface.com or her Facebook page.