How to Become a Face Model

Face models don't worry about slight weight gain.

Becoming a face model has its advantages. If you specialize in posing for head shots, you needn’t live on celery and rice cakes, worry about a slight weight gain or be concerned about how clothing hangs on your body. Age doesn’t mean the end of a face model’s career, either, since our aging population is the focus of a great many magazines and ad campaigns. The field is crowded, but if your face is the one a client likes, you’ll stand out from the crowd.

Things You'll Need

• Photographs
• Model's composite
• Portfolio

Instructions

1. Assess your personality. Good cheekbones are great, but models must have infinite patience, nerves of steel and stamina. It usually takes hours to get a certain look and frame after frame of poses to reach the client’s goal. Exhibiting patience and calm personality traits offers photographers and producers the kind of cooperation they crave in a model, leading to callbacks and repeat assignments.

2. Ask a professional photographer to take a series of photographs for your modeling composite. Instruct them to focus on tight head shots, but make sure they include some full-body images. Commercial photographers can be expensive, but you can save a bundle by heading to the local mall for your first shots. Bring along great head shots clipped from magazines in case the photographer needs some direction. Have the images, in JPEG format, put on a disk.

3. Make a model’s composite. If you know your way around computer software, set up an 8.5-by-11 inch landscape (horizontal) document. Import or embed at least five photos from the disk to the composite layout. Ask friends to pick the most flattering shot in the bunch, and then make it the largest one on the page. Show off your face to its best advantage by including face-on, left and right profile examples on the composite.

4. Add vital data to the composite by dragging or inserting a text box into the layout and typing this information into the box: your modeling name, height, weight, shoe and clothing size. Consider eliminating your actual last name from the equation for security reasons, but remember that you can’t sign working contracts using it unless you go to court to legally change it. Add contact information such as a cell phone number. Once you land modeling representation, their contact information will appear on the sheet.

5. Make a portfolio composed of enlarged prints. Any type of presentation portfolio with removable pages of protective acetate sleeves will do. This repository is the tool that sells clients, agents and others once they get past the composite. Include head shots showing you under different types of lighting: studio, outdoor and special effects. As your career grows, update the portfolio with tear sheets from publications in which you appear.

6. Get an agent. As a rule of thumb, ignore agents making too many promises and those who ask for up-front money. Reputable modeling agencies don’t charge pre-shoot fees to represent a model; they receive a 20 percent commission on average on per-booking earnings. Before you sign, ask to see some of the work their clients have done. You want an agent with ties to publications, not runway work (see the Resources section for links).

7. Find out what extra services each agent offers. Some compile model portfolios or updated composites for their clients as part of their fee structure. Others leave the job to you. Do your homework and find out which agencies handle the top face models and target them first. Your location may determine the universe of agents available to you, but big agencies have branches in major cities so look for them.

Tips & Warnings

• Prepare yourself for rejection. The glitz and glamor of being a professional model is almost always balanced by a huge amount of rejection. Going on auditions, sitting in a room with 40 other beauties--each one a head-turner--getting no callbacks after repeated modeling calls and other disappointments can’t help but take a toll on one’s self-esteem. Learning to live with rejection can be character building for some, but understand when you start that this is most often the factor that pushes models into retirement.

• Understand that there are no guarantees. If anyone--client, modeling school, agency--guarantees to get you a job the moment you sign a contract, head for the door!

• Avoid modeling schools. Many are expensive schemes established to exploit one’s desire to be in the spotlight.

Resources

• Creative Jobs Central: Modeling Agency Listings
• Models.com: Ford Modeling Agnecy
• Models.com: Elite Modeling Agency