Online Class: Face Painting 101

The first thing that is important to talk about in regards to face painting is artistic ability.   Many people mistakenly believe that in order to be extremely good at painting faces that you must also be an artist.   They believe you must be able to draw or paint well, or have some other artistic talent to be good at painting faces.  

In fact, many of our students sign up for this course hoping that we can teach them to paint the most complex designs.   They hope we'll take them from drawing stick figures to painting intricate butterfly wings on little girls' faces.  

The truth is that everyone has artistic ability, but the level of ability varies from person to person.  The level of artistic ability that you personally possess is based on how much instruction you've had and how much you practice.   While it's true that not all of us are Rembrandts capable of creating beautiful masterpieces that will hang in museums for years to come, it's also true that almost any of us can be taught to create art at such a level that our drawings, paintings, or whatever we create will be recognizable to the human eye.   

If you already enjoy sketching, drawing, or painting on paper as a hobby, then face painting will still be a huge transition for you.   The drawing part may come easier since you already have an eye for the lines and shapes, but you will still have to adjust to using the face as a canvas and how to apply paint to skin.  

Start studying human faces.   Look at the bone structure, the facial profiles, and start imagining how you'd take a lion's face and paint it on that of a child.  What about a butterfly?   On the human face, your paintings can be as simple or as intricate as you want them to be.   In this course, we'll teach you how to plan them out just as you would scenery on paper. 

There are dozens of different types of supplies that you can buy for face painting.  In fact, it can get rather expensive.   Later in this course, we'll talk about face painting as a source of profit at fairs and carnivals and what you will need to get set up as a professional face painter.   However, for now, let's talk about the supplies you will need to get through this course.

Each lesson of the course contains information pertinent to face painting. In this course, we'll talk about techniques and, in others, we'll actually teach you some faces that you can create by walking you through them step-by-step.   At the end of each lesson, there will be a lesson exercise that will quiz you on the information that was presented to you in that lesson.   You will need to complete these exercises to pass the course.