I had never met Kiana before shooting her but she goes to my church and we have a bazillion mutual friends. Besides being just the sweetest girl ever she has a very exotic look being half caucasian and half Chinese. I was very excited she agreed to model for me even though I didn't have an exact plan for the shoot at the time. My goal was to come up with something new for an art show I was invited to be a part of. I was headed off on my ten year wedding anniversary cruise so I assumed I'd be able to come up with an idea during that time. No luck. It wasn't until the morning a few days before the shoot that I came up with the idea on the way to dropping my girls off at preschool. I swung by the hardware store and picked up several widths of run of the mill masking tape and headed off to see what I could come up with during the few hours they were at school. My inspiration was a 1923 painting by Alphonse Mucha of Sarah Bernhardt. We shot these down the hall from my girls' classroom in a youth room with a giant chalkboard. I made a big chalk circle and smeared it around with a wet rag to get the background. Her dress is just a giant piece of black knit fabric attached with safety pins.
