Erykah Badu
photography by James Hicks

This photo was taken for a photo shoot for a hair braiding magazine. Erykah had had henna done while in South Africa, and asked me to go over the design, and then improvise a little in the spots where the design was too faded to trace. We did the henna just a few hours before the shoot because she liked the look of the flaking paste!

You can also see this henna work in Erykah's latest video, "Love of Life". As some of my work on Erykah was simply going over someone else's work, what you can see in the video might be the work of the original artist. My original work was mostly on her upper arms which are hard to see in the video.