Face painting
What is more fun for kids than face painting? If you are planning to entertain a large number of kids – for a birthday party, corporate event, or church social – face painting can be an easy way to keep a large number of kids content and happy (by no means an easy accomplishment!). Before shelling out your life’s savings to get a clown to come and paint the kids’ faces, why don’t you try your hand at face painting? Learning to paint kids’ faces is not as hard as you think. Indeed, with a bit of practice and some patience, you can become quite skilled at creating fantastic images that the kids at your party will love.
Picking a Great Design
Obviously, if this will be your first time in front of a crowd of kids, it would be for the best if you prepared a few basic designs ahead of time. The Internet is a great resource for basic face painting designs that can be particularly useful when you are just starting out. From cats to dogs to everyone’s favorite superheroes, you will find usable designs that will make your life far more bearable, and hopefully make the prospect of putting your services to a hoard of children more palatable.
Face Painting Basics
The first step when the first child steps up to your table (although it is probably a good idea if you try this out on your own kids before casting your talents to the public), is to visualize what you want the final face to look like. This is where it can come in handy to have basic designs printed out prior to painting your first face. You can use normal paintbrushes to apply the face paint, but it is better to use sponges instead of paintbrushes to cover large areas such as when you want to apply a base paint color to the entire face. Using a sponge is good because you can cover a larger area faster, and you do not have to worry about rinsing the sponge because they are so cheap. Also, a sponge will let you apply paint to a large area more evenly which will prevent a patchy effect from developing. No matter if you are using a paintbrush or sponge, be sure to apply the face paint thinly; if the face paint is put on too thick, it will crack or loose its luster.
Your First Face Painting Session
Before your first face painting session, print off your favorite basic designs and limit yourself to the ones that you have practiced. Make the designs available to the kids at your event and have them pick the design that they want you to paint on their face. Hopefully, presenting the children with a limited range of options will keep them happy, and you from panicking when a kid asks for someone unheard of comic book character.
More Advanced Face Painting
After you have mastered the basics, it is time to test your face painting skills with some new challenges. One of the biggest challenges you can give yourself is to abandon your basic designs and ask the kids at your event to request what they want on their face. You will be surprised and delighted at their requests, and amazed at your newfound ability to paint faces!
Steve Dolan is an artist who loves to entertain. Find out how to face paint at
http://www.facepaintingweb.com. For more on body art go to
http://www.funtattoosweb.com
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