Our friend Philadelphia from the original and now extinct FacePaintingTips.com  brings us some great tips that we can all use!

Not as fast as you’d like to be with your face painting?
I totally understand and it’s only normal to want to become faster at face painting to allow you to paint the most amount of faces possible with the time you have allocated.

You want to make as many kids as possible happy and let’s not forget if you’re charging per face, you’ll make more money if you’re quicker!

Well here are 5 tips to help you become a fast face painter….

1. Keep it simple!

Choose simple designs that only use 5 colors or less, or designs that only have 5 steps layers or less. If the designs you have or are practicing are more complicated, then simplify them. You may find that they even look better simplified! Just paint the most important parts, and don’t get carried away with details. Trust me, sometimes…less is more and remember that children are usually just happy enough to get their faces painted; they don’t care so much that you didn’t go into intricate detail.

2. Focus on 10 designs and practice, practice, practice!

If you’re just beginning, then focus on 10 designs, maybe 5 that girls will definitely like then 5 for the boys. And then….practice, practice, and more practice! Along the way, you’ll find your own time saving techniques that work for you personally and develop some serious skills! If you’re finding it hard to get hold of models to paint on (your family and friends have become sick of being painted) then why don’t you buy a plastic manikin to practice on? They’re easy to clean and they don’t fidget or complain either! You’ll get tones of practice out of them and become a speedy face painter in no time!

3. Color Preparation

Once you’ve picked a set of 10 designs to focus on, make note of which colors each design needs. Then make sure to have all those colors ready before you start face painting. This might mean, you’ll have to premix colors. This kind of preparation saves a lot of time, so you can be a faster face painter!

4. Stock Up on Brushes

Stock up on brushes and have one brush for each color. Could you imagine if you only used one brush and you were washing it every two seconds between different colors? It would take you forever! The more brushes you have the quicker you’ can work.

5. Don’t be a Perfectionist!

Now, sometimes I’m guilty of being a perfectionist not just in face painting but in everyday life. And the thing about being a perfectionist is you can pretty much never succeed (because nobody’s perfect) and even if you do, you’ll take forever trying!

As a face painter, you really can’t afford to be a perfectionist. A child does not want to sit there for hours while you perfect every last detail. And anyway, what you think is not perfect, or not the best you can do doesn’t matter because of one simple reason. It doesn’t matter to the child! Remember that you’re your own harshest critic. What you think is ‘not up to scratch’ will probably still put a smile on a kids face anyway.

So don’t your waste time, (and the childs and parents time) by perfecting things that they won’t even notice or care about.

This is not to say you should get lazy and sloppy now! Do your best, but don’t get carried away with the little things that only the eye of a critical face painter can see.

And if you any other time saving tips of your own that make you a speedy face painter, I’d love to hear about, so please make a comment below!

Blog written by Philadelphia Tivoli